Originally published in Verbicide issue #6

I have spent time in the Hospital, but I am Better now, you must believe me. I am not sure for how long I was there. Did days masquerade as years or years as days? Who knows? But listen. I am not insane. I am only very convincing. I can be very convincing because I am not real. My mother died in labor and I think that never knowing my birth mother made me feel that I was not real – that I was only a game, a set of characteristics invented for the interest of others, some sort of psychological vector, a set of D&D dice rolls. And when you are not real, you sometimes get confused and think that it is everyone else that is not real and you are the only real. Don’t worry, though. I really am Better now. I take my medicine and usually the other side doesn’t slip through to where I brood at my shoe and notice things for hours on end. I used to do that, you know. Look at things for hours on end. After a while of this, you become attuned to a secret life taking place on infinite levels of perception.

Shortly into my stay at the Hospital, there arrived another patient, a girl by the name of Violet, who styled herself ultraviolet, because no one could see her. Violet taught me real things, smart things. She taught me that the Hands are the Brain and the Feet are the Monkey and when you hold them together, it forms a Symbol of Power. Violet was special: she thought with her Monkey and Played with her Brain and she needed no teaching. It was because of this that her toes grew very long, while her fingers were pudgy and short like toes. She walked barefoot, but was extremely careful to hide her hands inside the sleeves of the shaggy sweaters she always wore. The more bulky and ugly the sweater, the better she liked it.

When I was five I wanted to be an architect. I wanted to make things. To build things. Violet does not want this. Even when she was a baby, she would knock things over. She would cut her hair bad. One time Violet had to go to the hospital because she decided not to talk. She decided not to talk for a year and two months. Violet likes to tell stories. Lots of her stories are only lies though. Sometimes she forgets when she is lying and says her lies are true. She tells people she is from Delaware, even though she is from here. She likes to cut herself, too. I would be too scared to cut myself. I am very careful. I would never cut Violet. She is too beautiful.

I was in love with Violet, as I had been in love with no other. I had never touched a woman, nor talked to one in anything more than ugly pubic croaks. I was unnecessarily awkward and so was Violet, but we were comfortable together, and both very frisky. We tackled each other and got into food fights in the hospital cafeteria. We made a very funny joke about the seasons of the year. One time Violet asked me what season it was. Puzzled, I answered that it was summer. “Nope,” said Violet, “FALL!” And knocked me to the floor. After that we snuck the seasons joke in whenever we could.

“Good morning, my Spring Chicken.”

“I’m not a Spring Chicken.”

“Then I guess you must be a FALL chicken.”

I wanted to kiss Violet, but that was not to be. Whenever we were together and quiet, I would stutteringly try to explain my true feelings for her and try to figure out how she felt about me. But she had a rule. At any time during any conversation, she could say “Hi” and that meant you had just met her and you had to start the conversation over from scratch. This was a wall I could not get through, an absolute rule that could not be broken. If I tried to keep going, she would just, “Hi. … Hi. … Hi. …”

Or run away. Violet ran away a lot. We’d be sitting in Group discussing things, and suddenly for no reason that anybody understood, she would run and hide. She loved to hide. And peek. Such a curious little peeker. Perhaps this is what drew us together, we were both spies. Violet’s main target was the head psychiatrist, Dr. Spencer. Dr. Spencer was middle aged with a paunch and an irritating goatish quality to his voice, balding with a dark beard and large functional spectacles. He drank Pepsi One from a two liter bottle. Violet has a special fondness for causing him mischief. She was very naughty. She taught me a fun game called Move. Move is easy to play. Pick up something that someone has put down and move it. Move has three rules. Never Move far, Never Hide, and Never get caught. Violet also made sure on Thursdays when they had Chinese food at the hospital cafeteria to collect the fortune from his cookie out of the trash. Make an allusion during Group. Once she even stole his glasses to be naughty, but mostly it would just be little tidbits.

Whenever Dr. Spencer made his rounds of the ward, Violet would be sure to watch him. “Spy on Spencer,” she said it with such glee. And he would never see her. She would duck into the next room to overhear all his conversations.

She also had a mysterious ability to find things. Any time one of the patients lost something, she would go look for it. Lighters, keys, a ring. Sometimes she would not even have to look. She would just say where it was. She was a hidden lurker, and I think that it was this affinity with the hidden that connected her to lost objects. Everywhere Violet went, she would tag her name: uv, small and neat. Hidden, just like her, on the floorboard in the corner of the room, inside the refrigerator, behind the Coke machine, wherever no one would find it. I made it my mission to seek these uv’s out and add a line in front to make them luv.

Violet had a facial tic which caused her to blink incessantly. She would walk up to you and just stand there blinking like a newborn kitten and then run away as soon as you said anything to her. When we went around in Circle talking about why we were in the Hospital, everyone would talk about being suicidal or using drugs or running away from home. Not Violet. Violet said she had a “poorly constructed reality.” No details. Just concepts.

How to explain the dream that Violet and I shared to a mundane and petty world – a world of Seinfeld, magazines, and Pepsi One. Have you ever sacked up with a hot catch only to feel her tongue like worms down your throat? You are repulsed to find that sex with your centerfold angel degenerates to the same old slimy hairy smelly that all the Nair and deodorant in the world can never erase. You have become a co-conspirator in the lie of beauty, the lie that says that the human soul is encased in anything other than rotting meat, that says sex is anything other than the violation of a disgusting orifice. And this desperate denial spawns cologne and crash diets, depilation and disease. But together Violet and I, we built a new world, a cartoon cocoon; we invented our own language, and we called it love. We lived larger than life, so big we became caricatures, babies even. I dreamt that Violet was a chicken and when I gave her a piece of corn it meant that I loved her forever.

How I long to return to that tender forever. Poking about at Violet, or she at me. We made a reality of our own, Violet and I, and we called it Poinsettia after a plant that Violet treated like a pet. It was our baby, and we named it a beautiful word with beautiful sh-sounds in it. A word that rhymed with itself, a word that could not be written down, for it was made of sounds not letters. No matter how good we were to that plant, though, the poinsettia always seemed to be in ill-health. Maybe that is what bound me to her most of all, her love for that sickly little plant. Poinsettia was our imaginary playworld. It seemed like forever. We knew that God loved us just a little bit more than he loved everybody else, and we cuzzled up inside God’s Love like a little red cotoon, my beautiful and easily bruised Violet.

And one day, Violet tells me that she is being transferred to The Meadows, because she does not know how to play Better. But Violet does not like to play Better. She likes to play Hide and she likes to play Spy on Spencer, but she does not like to play Better. Dr. Spencer gives Violet medicine, and tells her that if the medicine does not work, she will be transferred to The Meadows. Violet does not deserve to be taken to The Meadows. The Meadows is a Community. Community means a Hospital where you stay. Violet does not like to stay. Violet likes to play.

Violet stopped crying all the time when they put her on the medicine. She also stopped blinking. She was mostly the same: a little less slap-happy, stopped cutting herself. Truncated. The antipsychotics they put her on made her lactate. We decided that she must’ve had a baby and lost it somewhere. We spent hours looking for it: under beds, in the trashbasket, in Violet’s ears (they were large enough to hold a baby), all over.

We never found it.