I’m ready to talk: Part 3.

There’s no photos, no eloquent writings or suicide notes from the night, or the day after. Because it wasn’t glamorous or romantic, and I didn’t sit and cry beautifully and write loving poetry to my family. I didn’t take selfies or photos of my drip in the hospital and I wasn’t able to live blog the tragic-ness of it all. Not that there’s a criticism within anybody expressing themselves that way, just that I was unable to express myself in any kind of reasonable or rational way. My suicide notes to loved ones were erratic and half-formed, I couldn’t even read my own writing. They were bitter and angry and just as erratic as the mind who thought it would be easier to just die.  

I keep convincing myself that I died

Rice cakes rice cakes every time I think of them, see them, I saw some on the shelf in Holland and Barrett and forgot to breathe they conjure up images of pills pills so many white pills and when I think of them

my chest
It fills it cracks
With a thousand white pills they fill me up

You know it took me an hour to take all seventy
I lied
– Sixty-four

I rounded it to seventy I thought it was safer as the words spilled from my mumbling lips at 2am as I apologised I think I apologised to the woman on the line

I set my alarm for 1am
Just in case
Just in case I changed my mind

Homeland was paused on Netflix and I saw its image sideways as I started to drift like somebody was putting me to sleep

At 1am I drifted into life. But I switched my alarm off and decided it was time to sleep. I’ve decided.

When I woke I couldn’t stop being sick
Red liquid rice cakes and alcohol neatly fell into the toilet like I was an unsteady drunk everything blurred but it didn’t feel like any kind of drunk I’d ever been

In the hospital I kept vomiting and vomiting and passing out and spilling my sick all over myself the a&e was full of real sick people and I know my sister says

My sister says that I am sick but I know
That I put myself there and took a bed and took it for days and I know I am sick but I still put myself there.

I didn’t get a pillowcase for a night, so the pillow had my vomit on. James put the case on for me and I just listened to the rain and pretended everything was fine everything was absolutely fine.

(I had woken up to find James messaging me from outside my flat, whilst I was saying I was there(I wasn’t I really clearly was not)in my flat. But I’m laying in the bed looking up at the rain hitting the glass paneled ceiling of a&e. Don’t tell mum don’t tell mum. I’m all text messaging mum fake “yeah I’m totally fine haha I can’t talk right now, just a  bit poorly at home! I’m fine! Didn’t mean to call Dad just an accident! I’m fine!” but I had fucked-up-dialled Dad by mistake at 2am for a few rings instead of an ambulance so the family had sent James on a recon mission.

-I think when you’re so absorbed in whatever depression or whatever fucked-upness is going on with you, you end up forgetting that other people exist, and that they care and love and worry.-

It all crumbles and this time I can’t pretend I’m okay. I can’t half-surprisedly wake up after taking a ton of pills and go to school go to work and carry on like nothing’s wrong. I’m not in my flat. I’m not okay. I’m laying in my own vomit and I don’t know what’s going on and the hospital is so so full of real sick people that they don’t even have proper wards.

A day. Bed changes. A real ward. Family warmth. Another night. A therapist/ doctor/ psychiatrist/ I don’t even know is eventually able to get words out of me that aren’t slurred and dulled and covered in sick. We talk.

After hours and hours we talked about love and life and the art of falling apart, and as we leave I feel a warmth a wash a wetness I didn’t understand and I weakly laughed

“I think I’m bleeding”

I think I’m bleeding and he gets a nurse as I drag my IV into the bathroom and spill blood all over the floor and chunks of blood fall a river falls away from me, chunks and lumps and I don’t understand.

Hours and the day passes with more blood and confusion, I lay in bed and nibble on a Pringle. Nat has discovered that I will eat Pringles. I’ve mastered the skill of IV bathroom bleed journeys and I feel weirdly proud of this.

I can’t resist,, I’m left with quiet my family leaves and I can’t resist saying it all over again.

I can’t stop the words
From pouring out -I can’t-
Of love and hopes for the future, confusion and anger and a need to say it one more time

Like the last thousand times weren’t enough to make me understand how ‘fundamentally wrong we are for each other’.

Nurse shift changes and tests and confusion and I’m not allowed to be discharged. I need an extra 14 or 12 or whatever hours on the IV. And the nurses and doctors who are working so damn hard are in a bit of a stress because “that girl is just in here because she tried to kill herself” a whole day of blood and there’s still vomit in my hair and at 11 I wake up to the words “you’re pregnant”
“you’re miscarrying”

Two weeks ago I tried to close that chapter. And he says it’s ‘unlucky’ as the abortion is 98% effective.

But somebody has to be the 2%
Somebody has to be

Dramatic me.

I cry and they move me, the new nurse sits on the edge of my bed and talks about her own abortion, and that she was sorry. Mum and Andy get back out of bed to come and fetch me.

They discharge me at 1am and mum bundles me into the car, and I crawl into a hotel bed, ready for a scan tomorrow and scared of bleeding on the hotel sheets. (I do.)

 But after this, there comes recovery. And that’s what all this writing, blogging, spilling your guts to strangers and friends stuff is all about, isn’t it? It’s about blurting it out to relive and re-examine and to REALISE that you have come past it, that you are still coming past it.