On the Brink of Insanity in Greece

This is Girl speaking. I learned I was mad the night I sat down to write about my experience with being hospitalized in a foreign country. I was seated at the balcony, listening in on the crickets singing (or whatever it is that crickets do), and replacing it with the hushing between nurses who do not speak of the dead and the dripping. Oh, the constant dripping. Some might compare it to a tap someone refused to turn off, but I, yes, I saw it as a reminder, of borrowed time, of the fine line between driving to the mountains with a clear head and laying in a ditch as the rain drops on your scalp, one by one. 

Drip, drip, drip. 

The doctors were a whole other ordeal. Where the nurses were tender, the doctors were rough, loud, made it clear that no pain will go away just by not talking about it. They brought in their big, scary devices and did not once try to act like the sting would not hurt. They noted down the answers to the stupid questions that not even they listened to. And then they left, went on laughing with their colleagues, while I was still in the room, that dim-lit room which was wearing its walls inside out. I started wondering if I was already gone, if death could be premature. The dripping started to sound an awful lot like the beating of a failing heart then. 

So, I pressed down the pen to get all I remembered down on paper, to scribble whatever I could before my hand would betray me, but the pen was out of ink. I stared down at the blank page, turned back to the bed I had just laid in, and that is when it hit me. 

I had never been to any hospital. 

My days had been spent in my hotel room, disconnected from the rest of the world due to internet being in unstable condition. I had looked up to the sun, but not enough to be blinded by it. All my wounds were internal. I had overheard in a passing that a local was being picked up by an ambulance, and somehow, I had taken a piece of them, this person I did not even know, and made it mine. I had this strong sensation, these vivid images, that it was true, that I really had spent a night or two at the hospital. I was so sure of it, so sure. But it was all made up. It was a story I had told myself so many times that it had taken up space with the rest of my memories. 

Whatever memories are even made of…

I was known to have a solid memory as a child. My friends would be amazed by the details I would recall from our adventures, how I could be trusted to carry their legacy, as well as my own. Never once was I worried about misremembering. I had my ways of drawing lines of associations, of relating the presence of a goat in the background to words that would forever stick with me. It was a neat skill to have. However, I was also known to have a colorful imagination, rumored to be a girl who would spend most of her days in her own head and share its fabricated content to whoever had the patience to listen. I was a storyteller before I even knew how a pen would feel in my hand. 

I guess somewhere along the line, I started using stories to shape memories and memories to write stories. 

I let my journal be, and headed to bed, constantly checking in on myself if I was aware of where I was and what was going on. I was scared to close my eyes, because dreams are where imagination and reality collapses. I woke up many times that night, in cold sweats and panic, fighting off the dark figures that would surround me even when awake. 

I opened my eyes one last time, and the next thing I knew, the sun was out and I was at the beach. I had decided to go out for a swim, with no clear destination in mind. The distance to shore grew greater. The temperature in the water was closer to the air above. It felt a bit like flying. However, I recognized my own insignificance in the fishes swimming in a stream beneath me. I was waiting for a shadow to approach, one of a beast with an eye larger than my head, or for a tentacle to drag me down to depths beyond reach, but nothing happened. It was just me, the fishes, and the silence of an empty ocean. The only thing to forsake me, would be my own muscles and will. 

I was eventually washed up on a small island. Crawling up the coastal boulders, half-naked and covered in sand, I looked up to a cross. A monastery. In front of me, was a monastery. I thought to myself that there must be some sort of symbolism to be had here, that some poet out there should write about it, the naked girl and the cross. If my bare skin represented something rotten reeking of sin, or the purity of a soul reborn, I could not decide. All I knew, was that the memory was mine, and that I would hate to lose it. 

I kept moving towards the cliffside. I went as far out as I possibly could, and watched the waves slam into rocks with full force, shaping the formations little by little. A place which must have inspired thousands of people before me, driven them to action, led them either to the boat back home or to the depths where only sailors would search. I stretched my arm out, and there it was again, the line, the one in-between life and death. It was still so thin, but on top of it, a white butterfly stood, balancing it. Once upon a time it had just been a caterpillar fleeing from birds. It made a sacrifice, melted its wretched form, forgot about the traces of its hunger in the leaves, and learned to fly. It was a tempting thought for a girl who had been starving for a while. I felt myself being lured in, stretching myself beyond reach. Suddenly I no longer cared for poetry. I just wanted my presence to be documented. 

That must have been the clearest my mind had felt in a while.

I dove in, and when I got back up, I was in a pool, head laying against the edge, and arms stretched out in a relaxed position. Throat sore, and a throbbing pain in my ears. A cat walked past me, meowing and demanding attention. The sun was setting, marking the end of a day to be forgotten. I am still here, I told myself, I have not gone anywhere. Yet, I knew of the cave underneath the cliffside, and of the tides reaching its roof. I knew of its sharp edges against skin and water so salty that only lungs would not thirst. Of the dead rat floating. Of how beautiful it looked down there, the sea angels following a path of turquoise light, and of the ship horn, its deafening roar pulling me out of it.

I laid floating on my back, while all I wished to keep near sunk beneath me. Too many fragments of me, of who I once was, has been lost. The girl with the sharp memory exists no more, and neither does the recollection of her. The answer to the last time she was loved, if she ever was, can be found somewhere on the bottom of the sea, and I do not intend to look for it. Neither will I look for the color of the bike I used to ride, the face of my only friend or what it felt like to wake up in someone else’s bed on the first day of snow, a bed I though could one day be mine. There will be no one to document the peace I held before I dropped it in the storm, when I saw the eyes of a girl still waiting go with it.

And that reduces me to the things I can never forget. The words which were said to me still linger in my ears, breaking up my reflection each morning, reminding me that a person can drag down so much more than just their dismal self. I want nothing to do with them; I want nothing more than for them go be somewhere in-between the gap of the cliffside and the poolside. But they are with me now, my entire existence led by them, these noises so loud that whatever follows, will simply be drowned out, not mean a thing. 

They are the reason I sat at the balcony that night and tapped myself so that I would not lose touch.

They are the reason there is room for nothing else. 

But they are all I have. 

But, please, just know that I will always grieve what I could have been remembered as, if I only would have had more.