Sometimes, before I go to sleep at night, I think about what my life could have been if my parents hadn't sent me away as a child. I could still be living with them in New York City, but instead I'm barely getting by in a town smaller than a few skyscrapers. But I can't change that now, I can only know what I did and hope that what I do now will yield better consequences later.
As a kid, my parents took me to church every Sunday. I learned a lot from the Sunday school tracher and I had fun. One day, after church, I imagined myself to be David and tied a big rock to a rope. I swung it over my head with as much force as I could muster pretending I was slaying the mighty warrior, Goliath, and saving my people; but I ended up hitting my head, which gave me a tremendous headache, and a little bump on my head, which my parents overeacted about.
My protective parents put me in an asylum so that I wouldn't cause harm to myself, or others, again, because the inceident with the rock was not the first time, or at least that's how they explained it to me.
The asylum, or as the "doctors" called it, the Center for People with Special Needs, was like a jail. Every day was the same, I woke up to the same old breakfast, eggs- scrambled with cheese, and some kind of juice. Then they would personally announce that we would have the next two hours for free time, as if it was a deviation from the schedule or something. We had nothing to do in these free periods except read a short list of approved books and play board games and attempt to solve puzzles with missing and broken pieces. If it was nice enough, which it never was, we were allowed to go out in the cement courts and play with deflated dodgeballs. Next came lunch, almost as miserable as breakfast unless you were able to sneak some of your own ingredients into your PBJ's. There was always enough food for everyone, but never enough for seconds or thirds, as everyone would have liked. After lunch, we were separated into groups for team-building exercises in a big gymnasium with observation rooms on the upper floor. At this point in the day, I felt like a mouse in a cage, the doctors would observe us and record what each of us did like we were experiments that they had to study as if they planned on dissecting us later. after dinner, and no dessert, they locked us into our rooms for the night.
Occasionally I would wake up and hear the sounds of the doctors making rounds, the shuffling of their elevator shoes on the tile floor and the whistle that signalled their coming and going, that was not necessary but always present. Sometimes there were other sounds too, some that couldn't be explained until the next day when I noticed that some "patients" were missing, always the quiet ones that would be easily missed, probably because they wouldn't be missed. I noticed though, and that wasenough for me, strange things happened in that plce, and I didn't want to stay to find out.
I wake up some morningsin a cold sweat because of detailed dreams of what happened to those missing kids, the ones that disappeared in the middle of the night. I dream that it could have been me, and I am happy that it was not. I will die before I return to that place, I can only pray that I will not have to make that choice.
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