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

what I was saying. I feel better now. It was an accident. It’s so silly! I just want to go home.’

‘You can’t. You’re not. You won’t. The psychiatric team have made the decision.’

‘Well, I’ll sign myself out and take full responsibility. You can’t stop me.’ I try to stand.

She steps forward. ‘We can and we will.’

My throat tightens.

‘What?’

My voice breaks.

‘Legally, we can and will be holding you for a minimum of seventy-two hours.’

She explains that the psychiatric ward is fit to burst. That the seventy-two hours can’t begin until I arrive in the ward, under specialised care. She can’t tell me how long I’ll be waiting. But, for now, and until then, I’d be on twenty-four-hour, one-on-one observation.

I open and close my mouth noiselessly. I think about the goldfish I had as a kid that I would take out of its bowl and pop on the silver corrugated drain by the sink, fascinated by its fight for life. How helpless, desperate and wild-eyed it looked in the face of death. Right at that moment, clutching the wall, cold and hard and rigid under my grasp, I wish I had died. I feel like I am dead. This can’t be life. This can’t be my life. I won’t survive it.

The doctor writes as I continue to gasp and gulp. Then the Suicide Preventer appears: the soft-faced woman whose job it is to ensure I don’t try again. The first woman in a long line of women. She arrives silently, takes her seat by the curtain, picks up the notepad and watches, constantly, writes, constantly. She looks on as I cry, close my eyes tight.

She’s small and old and frail. I think of how tiny she looks. How fragile. I could overpower her. I have to get out of here and she’s the only thing between me and the world, between me and freedom. I don’t want to hurt her. I won’t. But I want desperately to run. To say I need the toilet and then just keep walking, a half-pace quicker and quicker until I’m breaking into a run and smashing through these walls until I’m out on the street, feet pounding the sidewalk.

But even as my mind whirs and plots, I know that they know where I live, where I work, what my life looks like. I filled in too many forms. They will hunt me down and scoop me back up before I can enjoy the true taste of freedom. Things may, unbelievably, get even worse.

Hours pass, the sick sinks even further into my gums. I’m silent and still, eyes laser-focused on the wall. When I eventually do need to go to the toilet, I stand up. Start to walk. She follows me, just a couple of steps behind. When we get to the door of the disabled bathroom, I turn to face her.

‘Can you wait outside, please?’

‘I’m sorry, no.’ She shakes her head sadly. ‘Everywhere you go, I go.’ A pause as she waits for the penny to descend. ‘Everywhere.’

‘But I really want my privacy,’ I plead. ‘Please.’

She shakes her head and writes down some words I can’t see on the sheet of paper she’s still carrying with her. She lays the pencil to rest.

‘No. Let’s go.’

I open the door and we walk in together. My feet fight to run, twitch against the fabric of their socks. She locks the door and stands facing me. There’s a small square mirror above the sink and as I turn to face her, I glance at my unrecognisable face, now pink, shiny and swollen, distorted like a party balloon.

I lift my gown, squat and sit on the toilet seat. I see the red emergency cord hanging down just an inch to my right. I want to pull it. I want it to set me free. Rip a hole in the ceiling that I can fly through, taking off the roof with me. But I stay with my feet on the ground, against white tiles. I open my bladder and pee.

Pssssssssst.

My pee turns the water in the bowl bright yellow. The seconds pass.

Psssttttttttttttttttttt.

The red from my chest climbs up my throat like ivy and up over my face. I look at my Suicide Preventer and she meets my eyes, holds my gaze. I’m humiliated. I’m newly fucking furious.

As I sit with my thighs spread, the dark hair between them exposed while I lock eyes with a stranger, I’m aware of how desperate my situation is. How alone I am. I have no phone, no laptop, no numbers and no way of letting anyone know where I am. How would I raise the alarm? And if I did, who could help me, who would help me?

New York, a city in which I have always felt insignificant, small, a nothing, has swallowed me whole, without care. And there’s no indication when, or if, it will bother spitting me back out.

CHAPTER 4

I’m back in my cubicle, wearing a hospital gown, no underwear, with a blanket draped loosely over me. I clasp it between my legs tightly, seeking any comfort I can get. I’m waiting for my ‘transport’ to the cardiac ward. I wait and wait and don’t know how many hours pass as I face the wall, the colour sucked out of my entire body. My chest spasms, contracts, expands, shrinks, flexes, tightens until I think it’s going to split wide open.

I trace scratches on the wall – the cracks, the point at which the paint splinters and flakes. My right hand holds my legs, touches the coarse hair. I’m trying to become smaller until I disappear entirely. I look at the thin gap, the few inches of space between the bed and the wall, imagining my body slipping down, disappearing completely from view until they – the doctors, the nurses, the other patients – can’t see me, can’t find me.

The despair and fear comes in waves. The sobs stick inside my windpipe, are occasionally spat out. I put my