Drip, Drop, Splat

The idea for “Drip, Drop, Splat”, originally titled “Red Blossom and the Pink Prison”, was sparked by a writing contest earlier this year.

As someone, who lost her love of writing to depression, the fact that the contest even elicited a desire to pick up my pen, yes, I said pen, I still prefer to write long hand, was a spark I wasn’t ever sure I would feel again.

As I sat in my house that night, pen in hand, I realized more than anything I wanted to write about the part of mental illness we almost always keep in the dark — what does it look like in a person with mental illness when ideation moves from thought to intent to action?

So consider this upfront blurb your content warning. This story, that is not a story, will discuss suicide and its fallout.

There are many reasons as a community, and a society, we do not shine a light into this corner of mental illness. Certainly, it can be triggering to the individual who experienced a health crisis, to describe what happened. But the discussion and talk about suicide also has the potential to be harmful to anyone struggling with a mental illness who is not in a safe place with their disease. If that is you, please stop here, but know you are not alone and are seen. My door is always open (really).

For everyone else, I hope “Drip Drop Splat” helps you understand the shame and degradation individuals are made to feel during a health crisis when they are at their most vulnerable.

Finally, a couple parting notes as part of my “foreword”.

As you read the story below, it may at first bother you that physical descriptors are not used throughout “Drip Drop Splat”, but I purposely chose to not use descriptors as I want anyone reading it to be able to identify with the individuals in the story, and picture the physical embodiment of a person that is representative to/of them.

Second, although I continue to struggle with treatment-resistant depression, and it is highly doubtful my disease will ever be in remission, the place I am today, is very different from where I was almost 2.5 years ago. I am in a much better and safer place.

And with that I give you Drip Drop Splat

She dreamt this dream before, lived this nightmare a time or two, but she never thought this would be her story, the one she wrote because there was no other story to tell.

Drip, drop, splat…

Drip, drop, splat…

The sounds played on repeat, as she leaned wearily against the wall. She looked around herself with disinterest as red swept over the black and white tiles beneath her like the ocean so often does over sand. But red swimming below her feet wouldn’t sweep back out to sea, instead it continued to spread like the red algae blooms she witnessed growing up.

Drip, drop, splat…

Drip, drop, splat…

She heard a voice off in the distance that was getting louder by the second. “Who was screaming?” she wondered. But that voice, like all the sound around her, was muffled by the song playing before her on repeat, so she didn’t really pay the voice much mind though she did wish it was quieter because it was drowning out her melody.

Drip, drop, splat…

Drip, drop, splat…

Apathetically, she lolled her head a bit to the side, her hair falling in her face, to see if she could grasp where the dissonance in her song was coming from. “Oh,” she thought, “he is back, a bit too early.” As she thought this, her head lolled forward, with her chin dropping to her chest, as if she could pull herself inward and disappear into the red sea beneath her.

Yet, he still managed to see her and came running with the black medic backpack she always gave him grief about carrying everywhere. Falling to his knees into the red sea, beside her, he ripped the knife out of her hands, and grabbed her arms so tightly that for several weeks afterwards hand-shaped bruises appeared around her arms like handcuffs that could keep her locked and grounded to this plane.

As the red sea kept rising under them, he ripped open the medic bag, and kept muttering on repeat“no, no, no, this is all my fault” as he worked feverishly on her to stop the tide consuming the tiles beneath them.

Drip, drop, splat…

Drip, drop, splat…

She looked on disinterestedly as he worked, saying nothing, but thinking “why are you even bothering? I am so tired, it hurts so much, just let me go.” But despite the thoughts running through her mind, the only word she could make leave her lips as she watched him tourniquet her arms was, “no”. He looked up into her face upon hearing her, guilt and sadness sweeping over and consuming his face, and responded quietly, firmly, “Yes.” She wanted to say no, again, plead with him to let her be, let her go, but didn’t have the will to stop him, so she watched in utter stillness as he swaddled her arms in bands and bandages.

Silence engulfed them; the rhythm of her music, her cry silenced, and all too soon he lifted her out of the sea of red beneath the two of them.

As they rose, she sighed, resigned to her fate, and his help getting into clothes that she knew would eventually be seized from her as if she was a criminal. He stuffed her into the truck, and squealed out of the parking garage, as she laid her head against the window and looked out at the scenery passing by her with vacant eyes. She was sure that her ride to jail would be quick, but she saw her presumed prison only fleetingly as he passed it by and instead continued to drive, speed and weave in and out of traffic while making frantic calls. She turned her head over to look at, and listen to, him. But listening, listening, eventually broke what little was left of her, and so she turned her attention back to the view outside her window. In the distance, she saw the pink building where they were sure to detain her, rise in front of them. All too soon, they were at the entrance. The truck screeching to a halt, he quickly exited the truck, running over to her side of the vehicle. She looked at him again, as he yanked open her door, and said with as much strength as she could muster “no,”. But he would have none of it, “Yes,” he replied sternly, refusing to humor her.

As they entered the pink behemoth, he struggled to navigate the maze of hallways and doors, becoming more agitated as they failed to find where she needed to be booked and placed inpatient. Far too quickly, for her at least, they arrived at the entrance and room she dreaded. Here, in this room she would lose her autonomy and be patted down like a criminal. Somehow, he always forgot how she loathed this place and this room. No matter how much people said they cared, they never treated her like they did. Their behavior and commentary often dismissive of her, to them she was merely a thing that had to be dealt with, a disgrace to humanity. They took her blood, regardless of whether she wanted to give it, as if they would find something in it that would provide them a reason for the red that continued to seep through the cotton swathed around her arms. Of course, it could never be her brain, they did not like to hear that, the tipping point always had to be caused by alcohol, drugs, or violence, as if the pain, despair and fire roaring through, and in, her brain was not sufficient, in and of itself. People always wanted a reason, it was a comfort she supposed, but they never liked it when the result came back and gave them a reason that was not so easy to fix, if it even could be.

Before she could even process this first part of her visit, she was stripped by an attendant of her clothes, of her identity, her autonomy, given a jumpsuit, or a uniform if you wanted to be kind, and taken away. As the doors closed behind her, she turned around to look for-longingly at him, as if he would reach out and free her. But with his shoulders bent over, and his arms hanging listlessly at his side, he simply looked on dejectedly, muttering over and over again “it’s all my fault”, a refrain he had spoken incessantly to her, to them, since he first found her and their arrival to the land of pink.

And as the doors closed and locked behind her, the attendant put a hand on her back to move her towards her room. There on the bed they assigned her she sat, empty of emotion, yet wanting to leave the world, her body, her brain, her everything, behind. But her jailors, as she so often thought of them, wouldn’t let her. Soon they dragged her from the bed and led her to a table in one of the raggediest conference rooms, she had ever seen, one of those rooms that clearly hasn’t been updated since the 1980s with all its yellows, browns and beige, but so desperately needed a renovation. There her warden had gathered himself and a host of others, who would in their own way judge and sentence her for her behavior and actions. He stayed standing and towered above her seated position, looking down with judgement filled eyes “you know next time you are here, it will be in the morgue, on a table,” as if that thought would scare or bother her. It didn’t, she had resigned herself to her death decades ago. This was, after all, not her first rodeo with death. She lowered her eyes to the hands in her lap as he continued to speak, and and the others around her joined in his refrain, but the sound of their voices soon became nothing more than background noise, with all her hearing was “blah, blah, blah,”. Eventually, an uncomfortable silence filled the room as their voices died off when she failed to engage with them all. She raised her eyes and looked at the people gathered around her, the majority whose eyes stared back at her with disdain and contempt, and asked, “Are you done? Can I be excused?” This seemed to infuriate her jailor, but he waved his hands, and said “go”.

And so, she left, turned down the hall to the room with the tv, and sat on an old plastic chair, wondering how long would she be here this time? She stayed sitting there for several hours, not moving, not speaking, sitting as still as a statue, but the tv going endlessly. The antithesis of her.

The broken man came to see her during visiting hours. Although he was the highlight of her day, she could tell she was not the highlight of his, that he would rather be anywhere but here. His pores seeped with guilt, despair, and desolation. Every time he looked at her, he kept repeating, “it’s all my fault,”. She gazed on in sadness, each time he murmured these words, to himself, to her. The sorrow she felt, however, was not at the loss of her freedom or her own despair, but at the hopelessness and desolation that never left his face as he stared at her arms that were stitched, glued, and swaddled with bandages like a newborn. All too soon their visit drew to an end, and as he moved to leave, he said yet again, “it’s all my fault.” She turned to face him head on, reached up and out with one of her hands to touch his face, his eyes shifted to her arm, before meeting her eyes. And as his eyes met hers, she thought “I do not have much to give, but I can give him this, her actions, the melody playing through her, was on her, not on him”. Her voice soft and gentle as if she was speaking to a distraught child, she said to him, “It is not your fault, my brain is just broken.” He shook his head, tears filling his eyes, and he said chokingly, emphatically, “but it is my fault, it is.” She continued to look into his eyes, and moved to gently stroke the cheek she held cupped in her hand, and then moved to softly touch his forehead; with a melancholy smile, she slowly shook her head and said “No.” He looked at her longingly one last time, wanting so desperately to believe her words, before pulling away from her caress, to turn and leave without another backward glance. As he left her behind, her momentary strength slipped away leaving a shriveled old woman standing where one in her prime should be. Her shoulders hunched over, she trudged back to her room, sitting on her bed to stare into the nothingness before her.

After what seemed like an eternity, she was released back into his care, though those in what she viewed as the pink prison, were concerned her “good behavior” was just for show so that she could be free. They were not wrong; she knew how to act with the best of them, and so she gave them the words and the show they wanted to hear and see. Still as she and he made the journey back home, she tried to convince him, her actions, her melody…

Drip, drop, splat…

Drip, drop, splat…

And the never-ending sea of red he walked into, were not his fault. But he would not listen to her, he had made up his mind, he was the villain in her story…

But while there was always a melody of dissonance running through her brain, ready to play its song at a moment’s notice, there were no villains in her story, only bad actors, and he, while far from perfect, was the protagonist in her story, he was the character that saved her when no one else could or would.

Drip, drop, splat…