Suicides Learning To Speak

It’s 6 a.m. A girl is beginning the journey back from Oz, anchored to life by the whirr and beep of machines and tubes. Above her emaciated body, nurses pace, write on clipboards, click their heels and purse their lips. She is oblivious. Her mind drifts in freefall, stuck in an eggshell skull wrapped in nasal gastric tubing and an oxygen pipe forced down her throat like a synthetic umbilical cord. Somewhere, neurotransmitters are sewing themselves back into conscious awareness. There is a person lost somewhere in that body. There is a mind overboard in a black sea, sending up a flare. The nurses are afraid that she will stay in there forever. A family jostles at the side of the bed in the cramped, generic hospital room. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men… I don’t need ruby shoes to find my way home. My name is Ruby, the nurses click their heels and my family makes the wish.

I’m finding my way back to consciousness through the sound of her voice. I don’t understand the words – everything is muffled and heavy and dark. My mind is slow and drunken; a caterpillar in a cotton wool cocoon of the “sweet, drugged waking” in my post-vegetative state.  

She sounds like an echo somewhere above. There are other voices – alien murmurs and familiar shadows overlapping in waves and oceans of sound. It’s like reaching through water blind. My waterlogged brain is a damp cake of softened mud and mush, and words have no meaning anymore. There is only the sound of her voice.  

She is crying and I wonder why.  

Light is coming back in blurry impressions of hospital lights and faces that slide away. I try to cry out but there is something in my mouth. It’s hard and I can feel it in my throat. I don’t know what it is, and I’m scared and desperate for a physical sense of her.  

Later, I’ll wonder if this is how we were in the womb. Where everything was heavy and dark and words had no meaning. Where there was nothing but us – twin hearts beating beside each other. I wonder if I reached for her in the blackness to anchor me to life even then.

Her voice is the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard, and I have lost mine.  

When they take the tube out, my tongue will be silenced with pain. I feel like I’ve been forgetting how to speak my whole life. Sometimes I can’t remember how to form sounds and shapes with my lips, or which sounds make words together. Medication makes my speech slow and syllabic. Mania makes them tumble together in a desperate race to escape my face. Words spit and spill all over each other in a psychobabble bullshit of sickness and insanity. Psychosis muddles them in a salad of words and gobbledegook made-up adjectives and verbs that I understand but no one else can. In my adolescence I grew selectively mute, weighed down by illness and shame and loneliness. My name was too heavy for my own lips. Now, I’m mute again. When the physical pain of the tube fades, the pain and guilt of a failed suicide stays.  

When I try to speak, my brain is still too broken to make sense, and it’s gobbledegook again. I babble and cry, and the doctors and my family are afraid of brain damage.  

Coffee will always remind me of hospitals. Every psychiatric ward is the same, an echo of another ward; a parody of itself. The cheap taste of decaffeinated Nescafe, and the stale smell that hangs around in all of the plastic hospital cups that we forget to rinse; helpless and sluggish in the “Seroquel stupor” or lost in the surrealist world of hallucinations. We are numbed out in nightmares of depression, or phobic of drinking from re-used communal cups at all. Real coffee is brought by tea ladies once a day, in the slow afternoon. It’s timed enough so that it won’t interfere with anyone’s meds, or available enough for anyone to continue indulging or to develop a caffeine addiction.  

Jay has spilled the coffee on his brassiere. He laughs and sponges at it, and manages to smudge his nail polish on it too. He makes a quip about being a “damsel in distress”. I want to joke with him, and take a toke of his cigarette, but my mind still isn’t working right, and I can’t form the words in my head. I watch instead, while Matty jokingly calls Pizza Hut, and orders a pizza to be sent to the ward. We all know the pizza delivery boy will never be given clearance to get through the heavy security doors. But the thought of pizza and normality makes everyone feel better, for a little while. Mira tries to get me to help her sneak alcohol in through a thermos, but the nurses are onto us, and I’m still too slow to form plausible (or intelligible) excuses. They make us watch while they tip all of that malt liquor down the drain. It’s treacle-coloured and smells like heaven. The smell of it won’t last in my memory, though. Coffee will fill the spaces in my skull, and I’ll learn to associate coffee satchels with guilt.