Coming Undone by Terri White (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) 📕

written “hears voices” can you please cross it out? I definitely don’t hear voices. Not like that.’

She makes a motion to scratch something out but no ink leaves her pen and marks the paper. I ask once more, the exact same question, and she now holds the pen completely still. Tears fill my eyes in panic. I’m making it worse. Every word and movement. I need to stop. I lie back, squeeze my eyes shut and try to breathe through the panic clogging my throat up. I turn on my side away from her, resisting the urge to argue more, to explain more, aware that the situation could possibly get even worse than it currently is.

The next morning, after breakfast, the Suicide Preventer takes me to the shower. I’m given a thin towel and soap. I shuffle to the shower in my hospital gown and socks. We walk inside the shower room. It’s a bleak beige room, with dirty tiles and a shower that drips mournfully. I take off my gown and socks, fold them up and place them on the plastic seat by the door. I try to shield my body from her eyes, turn to face the wall and cover my breasts with one hand and turn the tap on with the other. The water that spits out is cold, flecks my body wet as I try to get myself clean.

The Suicide Preventer tuts. I turn my head over my shoulder. ‘Why would you do this?’ she says. I frown. ‘You have a beautiful body, you do. So why would you do this?’

A few hours later, my twenty-four-hour cardiac observation is complete and I’m waiting to be taken to the psychiatric ward upstairs.

‘When will I be leaving?’ I ask the nurse.

She frowns, looks at my chart. ‘Oh, well, it’s pretty much always full,’ she says. ‘It could be several days’.

My stomach falls. ‘What?’ I say. ‘That’s not possible. They said that I can’t start my psychiatric observation until I’m on the ward – if it’s days and days I could be in here weeks.’

She shrugs and walks away.

On the third day, I demand to see the hospital’s psychiatrist, a kindly old man with crumpled skin and thick glasses. There’s very little he can do, he says. They can’t move me up until someone else is ready to leave and they have no clue when that will be. I cry, sobs from my gut and he steps forwards, seemingly moved somewhat. ‘We could try to get another hospital to take you. If they have another bed. And depending on your insurance.’

I grasp onto the thin sliver of light. ‘Yes, oh, please. What do I need to do?’

The psychiatric team find me a bed at a hospital uptown, but it’s one that needs my insurance company to approve my treatment before admission. I call my insurance company. A robot on the phone tells me that they have seventy-two hours to process the request. I splutter. ‘Seventy-two hours? No, no, please. You have to sort it faster. I’m stuck in hospital. I’m trapped – please help me.’

They promise to call back. There is no call. The doctors stay away from my bedside. On Wednesday, four days after that terrible morning in the ER, an orderly arrives by my bed. My heart leaps. I must be being taken upstairs.

‘Sorry, miss,’ he says. ‘We’re just moving you to another ward.’

I’m taken to a half-empty ward, full of quiet and the light from a perfect blue moonlit sky. My bed is tucked by the farthest window. I spent hours dreaming of the Empire State Building. She was why I’d moved here. The promise, the hope, the opportunity and bottled, captured joy she held. With her reflected in my eyes, I felt like everything, all of it, was possible. But not right now. Right now, she looks like despair, like betrayal. Like sadness and sorrow. How could she lie to me like this? I sleep in her shadow, dreaming of climbing up her elegance, sitting astride the top, squatting over her, making her submit to my pain.

CHAPTER 5

Finally, I’m told it’s happening, definitely. That my bed is ready and that an ambulance will be here to transport me. I wake up at dawn, excited as though it’s 25th December.

I eat breakfast, take a shower under supervision and then sit on the bed, waiting for my morning transfer. I’m not allowed to wear my own clothes, so I’m in a fresh backless patterned hospital gown and socks.

I’ve pinned the beehive that has been resting in the bedside unit drawer to my head. Bun piece, as high and erect as possible, then a grey sock folded over to cover it, then two pieces of matted clip-in hair, then my own hair, pinned tight, sprayed stock-still with lacquer. My scalp winces and pulsates under the tug and the pull and the push it hasn’t felt now for almost a week. It is the longest time I’ve had my hair down, unpinned, worn ‘naturally’, in several months. I won’t even go to the bodega on the corner of my block without it normally, but quite honestly, the fact that I don’t look like ‘myself’, have my head armour, has been the least of my worries. And I’ve found salvation and a safety of sorts in hiding, incognito without my trademark look. I don’t want anyone to know who I am and what I’m doing there.

I know how ridiculous I must look, building it straight up, at a ninety-degree angle, while the other patients and their friends and families look on bemused, but it’s the only way I can cling on to the tiny bit of me I still know, or at least recognise. And I need it, in this moment, more than ever.

I need to start rebuilding myself, even if just the exterior. It’s time to paint my face, over features which have been left blank. I wipe foundation over my skin, becoming an