Fall 2022 | Occasus | Issue 12

Bonzo Goes to the Psych Ward

“Each day is where it all begins…If we give ourselves to every breath, then we’re all in the running for a hero’s death”
                                    – Fontaines D.C.

One night last spring I got it into my head that I wanted, very much, to die. I told my mother, and she very bravely called the hospital which sent an ambulance to the scene about an hour past immediately. My father rubbed my back while the panic attacks ebbed into apathy, and I gasped into a pillow.
           
It was my second scrape with emergency services in 5 months and the one thing I noticed was, on the phone at least, they’re always annoyingly concerned about the other people. They don’t care that it’s a paring knife you used, y’know, the kind you would use to skin apples. They want to know if you still have it, if you’re planning to use it on the EMTs.
           
It makes me want to laugh and scream. Why would I want to hurt others? Preposterous.
           
When I got to the hospital that spring it was night. A naïve police officer brought a tilted man into the waiting room. The offender, as it turned out, was something of a regular at the hospital, frequently having himself brought in on fabricated claims of pain in order to gain a night of indoor rest.
           
Sometime after the regular began snoring, there was a slight parade of doctors and nurses rushing through the triage. Someone had been stabbed in the neck. Apparently, there was blood all over.
           
This visit I had brought Obama’s Dreams from My Father.  In it, Obama went back to Africa to discover his roots in his father’s family. It was beautifully distracting. His relatives on both sides charmingly called him Barry.
           
The same doctor from my first visit sat across from me. I almost expected a “back so soon?”
             
There were no stitches this time, in their place a 24 hour hold form. Though the greatest of my urges had fled by the time the ambulance had pulled into my driveway, I signed anyway. “My life for you” as the Trash-Can man says.[1]
           
Shortly after signing my problems off to the hospital staff, I received a gift--the true reason anyone visits the psych ward: the grippy socks. Mine were preschool red with white padding on the bottom. They give the illusion of sticking to walls. I felt like Spider-Man.
           
The rest of the outfit wasn’t as rewarding. I shivered through the gown as one of the attendants took my vitals, drew blood. My veins are something of a hot commodity in hospitals. One flex and the syringe slides in like butter. This leads me to believe I could’ve been a prodigy among heroin users. Alas.
           
Three or so hours later, around 4am, a room opened up.
           
I know we’re supposed to avoid clichés in this course, but for this piece I am sworn to the truth. Thus, picture the quintessential psych ward Jack Nicholson inhabits in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The walls were lime green brick. The floor was black. On the sole door, there was a submarine porthole for a window. Had I been slightly closer to delirium I would have howled and shrieked, expecting Nurse Ratchet to swim around the corner.
           
In the room there was a single hospital mattress on a stretcher, and given the above average size of the room, it seemed only fair. I laid down, preparing myself for a cold slumber.
           
Then the same attendant that took my blood came in. Looking back, she was probably my close to my age. We could’ve had a class together.
           
However, in that sleep deprived state, beaten down, tangling, strangled in all the thoughts, fears, worst of all a tiny, pathetically, miniscule bit of hope, she appeared Pentecostal. The thin pillow she held out as a halo; the flame of the holy spirit showed its warmth as a thin blanket.
           
That night is blunt to write about. I can’t make it flow like I would fiction; reality is far more viscous. When you finally crack the meaning though it’s a touch of God in your head.
           
I’ve seen death in the mirror, a grin, bleeding back at me. That night I saw love in a handful of bedding.
           
Pillows and blankets aren’t as slippery as words, thoughts or prayers. They’re solid. Anchors.
           
That night a nurse handed me tangibility. She may have looked scared, tired, underpaid, but the action spoke past that.
           
You’re here. Everything else may have happened how it did, but you’re going to be warm tonight. It’ll be soft under your head.
             
​With that death shuffled away from my mirror, as I saw myself, radiant in glow of the reassurance I’d discovered reflecting back from submarine window of my little green room, somehow cozy, content enough to chuckle internally upon thinking, “bedtime for Bonzo!”, before immediately passing out.


[1] If you didn’t get that please read The Stand. What have you been doing with your life?

Julien Tremblay is a third year student completing an Honours Specialization in Creative Writing and English Language and Literature. Currently, he is writing post-modern inspired fiction and creative nonfiction pieces.