Member-only story
To the Boy I Saw in Fever Dreams
I knew he wasn’t real, but that made it easier somehow.
My pulse races as if I’ve just run a marathon in record time.
Three nurses hold me down while a fourth injects me with what I’ll later know was a tranquilizer. I won’t remember the before of what happened — what led to the moment I was treated as a danger to myself and others.
Afterwards, I lay against the hospital bed, limp, my eyes staring straight towards the closed door.
Minutes or hours pass, I can’t tell. Another nurse peers through the square glass — checking on me, I’m sure, since that’s just part of her job.
I’ve given them trouble this go-around. That’s all I really know.
In a space between awareness and something like sleep, I conjure up a phantom who sits on the side of the bed, fingertips lightly passing over my head.
My eyes flutter open, but there’s no one there.
The vision’s not so much a hallucination as a coping mechanism. Voices in my mind whispered secrets to me — or so I believed — and they were my brand of crazy.
I breathe in and out, trying to steady myself in this room that’s become a type of prison.
