The Wrong Reaction

Source: http://www.doubleblind.org/

     It took only a moment to realize that there was a man watching me from behind the mirror.  They’d dragged me into this sitting room, pleasant as it was, to watch me.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if the officer who had been sent to collect me wasn’t behind the mirror as well, with all of the doctors and such who would be examining me.

Shit.

     I looked around the room, taking in the sickeningly sweet pink wallpaper, the floral upholstery of all the furniture, the water cooler that dripped every so often, the bubbling coffee machine that seemed peculiar in the deathly quiet place.  It wasn’t at all what I’d first expected to see in a mental asylum, but then again, I suppose they would have had to make some place pleasant enough for visiting families to sit while they waited for their insane relatives to be led to them from the facilities behind the big white doors.

     The police had bust into my house after I made the mistake of telling a good friend of mine about some dreams I have had lately, dreams in which I had died.  I confided in her that at one time in my life, a long time ago when I was still basically a child, I had been pseudo-suicidal, constantly thinking about how I might do it, how I might hurt myself or put myself into some inescapable danger – just to say it wasn’t actually my doing.

     But never actually doing it.  Never actually wanting to do it!  Never even considering the effects, beyond a bemused longing to know that perhaps those people around me, my parents, my siblings, my friends, would be at the very least touched by my untimely passing.

     Anyways, I had told her that I often thought of death, that at a moment’s notice, a slip of my hand as I made the turn on the interchange of a freeway, an accidental acceleration into perpendicular traffic while at a stoplight, overdosing on medication due to a misreading of the directions—

     There were so many different ways it could happen, I had told her.  We are so bloody fragile, I had said, that it is in fact a wonder we are even alive.  A wonder that our flight landed safely as we came back from the Bahamas, a wonder that I come back in one piece from my university campus every day, a wonder that – in spite of the fact that we have become so far removed from how humans are supposed to live – that we don’t just throw up our hands, give up, and jump off the nearest skyscraper just so we don’t have to keep breathing in the smog we’ve forgotten how to see every day.

     It is a curious thing, I had told her over a slice of pizza and some shitty beer.  It is fascinating that we are at once so fragile and so strong.  So easy it is for us to change our future with just a click of the wrong button, due to our own mistake or someone else’s.  Or purposefully, to make the choice not to let go of the wheel and let gravity and projectile motion take you where it may.

I suppose she took my existential musings the wrong way.

     Perhaps I’d read her wrong, and thought she would be alright with morbid philosophical thought.  Maybe there really was something wrong with me, that made me so fascinated by our mortality and the one-track mind of an animal who – even seeing the grim reaper closing in with his glittering scythe – would expend the last of its energy to live on, to grasp to the very thing it destroys every day with its advances in poisoned food, its tendency to shy away from proper medical care, and acting against its own interest to preserve its ‘status’.

     Maybe having drunken conversations about existentialism and mortality with people whose mind goes into a paranoid frenzy at the mention of the word ‘suicide’…

     That would explain why I have been sitting in the empty lobby of a rather quiet, pink-loving mental asylum waiting for the man behind the proverbial curtain to reveal himself and explain why I would be sitting in a cell under constant watch for the next two days.