Category: creative writing

jess ingrassellino, October 2020

content warning: attempted suicide, depression, inpatient hospitalization

… and there’s this idea that the stories

we tell ourselves are the stories others

believe…

A woman calls her daughter, cigarette

dangling between her yellowed fingers,

turning to ash faster than she can smoke.

She is my mother, and today, she’s called to

tell me she wants to die. I’ve heard it all before,

but against my better judgement, I listen.

“Of course, you wouldn’t understand,” she says.

“You wouldn’t know what this is like.”

But, go back. Go back ten years, and I am in

Zucker Hillside Hospital, Lowenstein 5, a woman

trying again and again and again to die.

I was so very angry then.

I am waiting for a phone call, call that

won’t come, from the black phones on the wall

(they don’t dial out), my right foot a metronome

keeping time with the pace of my thoughts.

I’ve always been a good talker.

Last year, I convinced them I was okay.

Six months ago, more of the same. But

this time isn’t the same. I’m trying to play my

game, telling them I’m ready, that I want to live.

They’ve heard it all before; this time,

they won’t let me leave.

There’s a record now, a blue vinyl binder

on a cart with other binders, blue and green, each

thick with the pain of past lives. My name is written on

a piece of masking tape stuck crooked on the back of the

binder; they pull mine from the shelf as the nurses aide

closes the door of the meeting room that’s

hiding behind all the locks.

I sit around the breakfast table with

five strangers become friends, trading my box of

cheerios for another hard-boiled egg, my milk for

an extra butter. These are the economics of an

inpatient hospitalization unit. Last night, they brought a

cake for my birthday and sang. This morning, I take the

hard-boiled eggs and butter, mash them up, and enjoy a

makeshift bacon-egg-and-cheese.

We sit after breakfast, before group, fantasize about

“getting out”; we don’t realize that inside this

asylum, the only prison is our minds.

So when my mother tells me I can’t possibly

understand, the anger comes again

(I was so angry then).

My heart is pounding, faster. I swallow the

urge to yell, breathing deep as I make the

left turn onto Oceania street.

“You wouldn’t know what I understand about

being in a mental hospital; you’ve never asked.”

She’s defensive now, her voice building walls,

but I’m justified. I waited ten years to speak my

peace like I waited on the cold dormitory bed,

reading alone with one ear on the black

phone at all times.

Parents come to the unit, waiting awkwardly for

the aide to buzz them through the locked door.

My stomach is in knots: rage, sadness, jealousy.

People without visitors, people like me, are

required to remain in our rooms for two hours

following dinner each night, left to feel we’re fragile,

broken, just because we want to be loved.

But today, my mother is crying, digging her heels in,

defending her lack of concern. All the terrible things

that happened to her happened to me, but

only one of us can forgive. And like every other

challenge to her carefully constructed narrative,

my story is the chapter she’s deleted from her

fiction. She’s replaced me with who she needs to be

to survive herself.

I hear her take a long drag on another cigarette, I

know those knotted hands are trembling with

anxiety and anger. She’s ugly when confronted; I’m

ugly when she refuses to hear me. We dance around

our truths, embracing the stories we tell ourselves

about how we live.

jess ingrassellino, summer 2019

(for my mother)

---

Tomorrow, she will graduate from

high school. But

today, she’ll walk down the aisle, her

white lace wedding dress

billowing with a baby bump,

her burden.

Her father, wearing his crisp navy suit,

will take her trembling arm.

He’ll tell her to stop crying, while a tear

struggles to escape from his own

red eye. They’ll walk slowly,

up the aisle,

to the organ’s song.

Wearily, she lifts her swollen feet

over the plush, red carpet.

Feet stuffed in the white wedge heels her

mother forced her to wear.

Tall, dark wooden pillars line the aisle like

great oaks. She steps into her future, unknown.

Greeted by the groom in his

Ruffled white tux, she smiles, but thinks:

“I should run.”

It all happens so fast, the

prayers and vows, rings and wows –

Through the stained-glass roof, the

sun beams down on the new bride and groom.

Kisses are exchanged, and

the organ starts an energetic Rondeau.

The bride faces her family –

old and new – all pink chiffon and

smart brown suits, with darker brown lapels,

staring up at her, with tears of

adoration and agony.

Together, she and her groom

march and wave at the family, and

pews recede as she approaches the

open chapel door, as if the door to the outside

might also mean

escape.

Bride and groom and baby,

forever intertwined, each

parent the plight of their

unborn child.