To those who say you can’t make a rock bleed.
I say I can.

It didn’t surprise me the air in Paris smelled the same as it did back home, and as it had in London. It was only hope that wanted different. Looking out the window, Rue de Vincent bent my left eye down its cement, and Rue de la Saint Claire guided my right down its length. In the middle was the hotel opposite my view from the window. I thought the air the same and the buildings built just as high from the ground up, as I watched out between the two streets. I opened the window with my left hand. I looked down, past the meat of my palm. I had scratched at a pole that was never going to bare bone. Feeling pathetic, I was embarrassed the way someone else was when they saw it. Across the way, the hotel became
unfocused, and I adjusted to bring it back. The hotel opposite me didn’t have small windows like mine but large vaulted ones. The kind you didn’t slide up but open from the middle out. A single man came into frame below on the rue to the right. I adjusted the shutter not to blur and took the photo.

After I told friends of my plans to go to Europe, they all speculated on the enjoyment of the trip, but almost always asked with concern, by yourself? My mother had always wanted to go to Paris, but after I told her, she was more nervous than jealous. I put the camera back in its bag, which took up the floor from the right of the bed to the reading table. My suitcase was on the opposite side, taking up the floor space to the window. The maid knocked for the third time that afternoon, and for the third time asked,“Comment t’allez vous?”

“Ca Va,” I answered. When I told her the room didn’t need to be
cleaned, she paid no attention and cleaned it anyway. I remembered how my grandfather never accepted “okay” as an honest answer, when he asked how life was treating me. The next time he asked I wanted to answer, it weighs a lot but not enough to put me in the ground yet.

The photo of the hotel with vault windows was only one of a dozen
photos I’d taken after being in Europe a month. I wasn’t there for memories. I felt I had enough, but I didn’t like to travel without cameras. I had only slept a few hours and my eyes were bloodshot. Red lines cracked across the whites as if my eyes were broken glass. The reading table housed the two books I’d brought. I was reading On the Road; I had never read it and felt it may be appropriate. The other I’d read during my first year of college. I wondered had Orwell almost died in London or in Paris? I didn’t
bother to open it and find out though. Downstairs, the young French girl at the desk couldn’t have been much older than I, twenty-six at the most. Her outfit glared the same cuteness I was too shy to ask out for dinner or a movie back home.

“Ou est la poste?” I asked. She turned her head from the computer
screen, and I heard a few “la droites”, caught a couple “la ouches”, before an array of words I didn’t know whether were street names or specific compass directions filled the lobby.

“D’accord,” I answered turning to open the lobby door.

“Do you want me to tell you how to get there in English?” she asked.

“That would probably be better,” I said. I was mailing a photo from
home I’d taken that I’d brought with me. I framed it the night before. It was a shot of a friend’s feet, while she sat on a stoop in Pittsburgh, waiting for a pizza to be made. She was wearing red high heels with dark blue jeans. The black and white photo tinted her shoes a lighter shade of black than it did the jeans. My attraction to her ankles had been the reason I shot it. On the back was written, “Paris 2003.” Below that I wrote, “The air is full of the dreams of sleeping people,” a quote taken from a photo I’d shot
of a graffiti artist’s paint, sewn into the cinder blocks of a library that was being demolished in my hometown.

In London, people in the pubs were eager to spark up conversation. Smelling an American from my accent, most enjoyed the opportunity to demonstrate their American accent. It didn’t help to be silent. I chopped my sentences down to a couple of words. It was inconceivable that I was in Europe alone, traveling around such a new place so far away from home. I simply didn’t feel like talking; not about certain subjects, just not do it. In Paris most people could understand my English, they just chose to ignore
me. I walked my photo to the post office and thought of how courteous a people they were.


I bought the ticket to London the day I got out of the hospital, a
couple of train passes a week later and waited four to six weeks for a passport. I’d come off medication months prior and found myself living with my parents once again. The Wellbutrin, Zoloft, Remron and Xanxax stayed behind at my apartment, waiting for its new tenant. They told me cutting cold-turkey wasn’t a safe way to stop. Like the water-displacement test for volume, serotonin levels will rise but drop below their original levels once the meds are taken out of the picture.

“Do you ever feel like hurting yourself,” doctors often asked.

“Like with a hammer?” I always wanted to answer. Mental illnesses are often referred to as diseases, but unlike AIDS and cancer I never believed they were life-threatening. If I tried to explain myself to someone, I usually heard “well, who hasn’t felt that way.” Things like AIDS, cancer, rape, molestation, pedophiles and everything else hearts couldn’t stomach proved to me God could be cruel.

When my doctor asked why I’d stopped taking medication, I thought, because God could’ve done a lot worse. He looked disappointed. I failed myself, but worse I failed him and those around me. A darker side of depression is how doctors will guilt you into being happy. One doctor told me a big problem I had was obsessiveness. It wasn’t so much being depressed as it was obsessing over it. I think it was the Zoloft for that. Being prescribed medication for anxiety, obsessiveness, depression, bipolar, and
later clinical depression made me think of doctors less as medical experts, and more as athletic trainers. With the right discipline, I could make it.

After the sutures of the Elkview emergency room, I waited as my mom signed me in at Dr. Frame’s reception desk. It was only once, not too hard, not very precise, and not deep enough. Dr. Frame didn’t have any of his usual questions, just if I understood what was going to happen from there. I’d tied his hands and left him with very few options. When my mother entered the room, she had the paper work he’d given her to sign. It stated, being of sound age and body, if I refused to stay the required minimum amount of days, which was to be discussed, in a state-run psychiatric hospital of West Virginia, I would be prosecuted in a court of law—punished to do so. Under Dr. Frame’s signature was my mother’s, and under hers I signed mine.

At check-in, they took my shoes and checked my suitcase like at an
airport baggage claim. I waved to my mother through the glass, just past the door that locked from the outside. Seven floors up, I received my shoes without their laces. My suitcase was in my room. The pencils and notepads were taken out. One by one, I was introduced to those who’d be helping me while I stayed at the River Park Hospital. The seventh floor was one of only a few that had a smoking room. I asked the attending nurses if they had my cigarettes from my suitcase. From behind the desk, one nurse
searched a list of names, looked at the medical band around my wrist and handed me one pack rather than both. I spent the days between group therapy and one-on-one mostly in the smoke room. The first day I was there, I met all 12 patients in a couple of drags.

“Darlin’, this is where the real therapy is,” the young girl said. She’d
been there a month and was the one closest my age. Looking at my arm and the bandage perpendicular to my fingers, “You done it the wrong direction,” she remarked. At night I was required to turn in the pencil I’d borrowed to write with, was given Remron for sleep and checked on hourly. I knew of the check because I tongued the pill to read at night, but had to pretend to sleep when I saw the flashlight track the hallway.

During one group session, we discussed where we’d thought we’d be in two years, and what we wanted to do when released from the hospital. Most answered vaguely with, “somewhere I can feel happy again and on the path to recovery on my medication.” I laughed aloud at the response of the crack addict to my right. Two years from then, he didn’t know where he wanted to be, but the day he was released, he was going to smoke the crack hidden in his pillowcase the police hadn’t found. I answered, “I want to start at becoming less stubborn.” I wanted to point at the crack addict and say two years from then I hoped to be sitting in his chair because it was the one closest the heater, but he had sat there first. And so I just said, “I don’t want to feel this anymore.”

On the one night they didn’t check my pockets, I wrote a story to a
friend of a teenage boy who’d met his demise early one morning in a mental hospital. Wearing only his socks and bath gown, he swayed his room’s armoire with his feet. Landing on his head, he only remembered the sound it made.


Looking at the photo of the hotel with windows that open from the
middle, I don’t remember Paris or London or Switzerland or Nice, but my stay at River Park Hospital. My window couldn’t be slid up or pushed from the middle. It didn’t open at all. We sat in the smoking room, the sun glared in from outside, through the glass then through the protective wire, but inside it was foggy. A rattled group who thought we found a loophole. Who hasn’t felt that way? Mental illness is that vague. It pits sadness against sadness. Bipolar beats manic. At least you’re obsessive but not compulsive,
or worse both. I see the photo and catch the bird flying above it all, over the windows that needed to be pushed rather than pulled. The bird gives the rather lifeless photo a heartbeat, but it is just a bird. I think of the fellow patients and of the doctor’s rhetoric.

Have you ever felt like hurting yourself?

Like with a hammer.

To questions like these, there is a right answer and a wrong.