I Didn T Belong Here: A Short Story

I felt like I didn’t belong. Maybe I didn’t belong here, but I didn’t belong anywhere else either. Part of me knew I needed to be in the hospital. I needed to heal. I needed to feel something again. The other part of me just felt like a psychopath.
Regardless of my raging and relentless thoughts, I only watched. I watched the kid that everyone called Mr. Smiley talk about his father’s alcoholism with his signature grin plastered on his face. I watched a young girl in a Minnie Mouse shirt talk about how she didn’t want to stand up to her bullies because she thought she deserved it. I watched a girl around my age scratch mindlessly at a healing wound that covered her entire forearm. Feet tapped, knees shook… calm didn’t seem to exist in this

room. I doubted it ever had. This all felt too ordinary. None of this should be normal, but no one seemed to be bothered by any horror story that anyone told. Today being my first day, I was bothered. I was also scared. If these people were anything like me, they were on the verge of explosion. I was really, really scared. The scariest part was I wasn’t just afraid of the other kids.
After some kids were pulled out to go to the anxiety or eating disorder program, the mood of the room changed. The remaining patients moved out of the circle and into more of a classroom type of therapy. People laughed and chatted as if no one had spilled their soul or their blood. I didn’t dare raise my hand to speak. I just continued watching, until the door opened with a loud creak and time stopped.
There wasn’t anything extraordinary about the kid that walked through the doorway. He was an average height with a slumped posture that immediately let everyone know he hated himself. The boy had young features framed by hair that was too long and accented with eyes that were too blue. It pained me to imagine any trace of red contrasting with his pale skin. Every patient in the room looked him up and down, observing each detail like I had done. Hands hidden in the sleeves of his black hoodie, he diverted all eye contact. Slowly, the boy made his way closer to me. I began to shake.
“Can I sit here?” he asked, pointing to the empty chair beside me.
We made eye contact for a little longer than was comfortable and I could tell that both of us were nervous. It took all of my confidence, which was running low, to reply to him at all.
“Uh, yeah sure,” I answered.
I tried to smile, but couldn’t. He didn’t smile either. Meeting new people always terrified me, but for some reason I wanted to know this kid. Out of all the empty seats he chose the one next to me and it excited me. I was hard to excite.
The drone of the therapist’s voice went on, talking about the importance of believing in something else in order to believe in yourself. Every once in awhile Christianity was pushed into the lesson and made it feel more like a sermon. I tried not to fall asleep. I tried not to scratch my arms. I tried not to peek at the boy next to me.
“I’m David.”
I turned my head and looked at him. He was looking at me too.
“Are you talking to me?” I whispered, trying not to interrupt the lesson.
“Yeah...” he whispered, looking away as if ashamed.
My hands gripped the sides of the hard plastic chair I sat on. I was shocked. People didn’t talk to me often. Nor did I talk to other people. I was never someone who attracted attention. It took me several excruciating seconds to process what was even happening. Something inside willed my vocal chords to work and I managed a simple response.
“I’m Jessica.”
I smiled at him.

It was a pathetic little smile, but a smile nonetheless. In less than a minute, I felt alive again. Maybe this hospital wasn’t a waste of my time.
We didn’t talk for the rest of the lesson. I spent my time observing the other kids. The girl with the huge wound was the only one who never looked away from the therapist. Most of the other kids were just as distracted as I was. They were all distracted by David. I got a strange feeling that David was meant to be here. He was a shooting star. You couldn’t look away and he made you want to believe in wishes again. It was then that I really understood what I was supposed to be learning. Believing in something else really did help people believe in themselves. I thought I believed in David.
As the therapist finished her speech all the kids began to arrange themselves into little groups. They laughed and joked around just as they had done before the lesson. Having not made any friends, I found myself alone. I knew I wanted David to talk to me, but the voice in my head said that he never would. The voice in the seat next to me had different plans.
“Hey, Jessica… so, um, what are you here for? If you don’t mind me asking, I don’t wanna be rude or anything…” David

rambled.
Taken aback, I motioned to the room and answered, “Well this is the ‘Self Injury Recovery Services’ program. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory.”
“Oh yeah I guess, but-” David began before being interrupted by a tap on his shoulder.
“Hi, I’m Ally.”
Both David and I turned to look at the girl behind us with surprised expressions.

She stared back at us with eyes that seemed to have an agenda.
“So David, what kind of music do you like?”
I shrunk into myself. Of course she only wanted to know about David. He was all I wanted to know about too. David didn’t reply right away and Ally began listing several bands that she listened to, all in the genres of pop-punk or screamo. I could feel how uncomfortable David felt. I could see it too. His hands were shaking.
“No, I don’t really listen to any of those people…” David interrupted.
I felt something right then. I felt like I knew something tremendously important. I felt like I had to say what I was thinking or I was going to explode. For a girl as quiet as I was, the sensation was frightening. So, I said what I needed to say.
“Do you listen to Neutral Milk Hotel?”
It was such a simple question. There wasn’t anything dramatic about it in reality, but asking it still made my heart race. Then, David smiled.
“Yes!” he replied.
Ally looked somewhere between annoyed and pissed off, but I couldn’t care less. Such anticlimactic words had never given me such satisfaction. David and I continued to talk about music. It felt effortless. It felt like breathing for the first time after being underwater. I wasn’t sure what was happening in that moment, but I knew that this interaction marked the division of my past and

future.
Our friendship only grew with each day we spent in the hospital. I stopped being afraid of him. I stopped being afraid of a lot of things. People asked if we were dating. We said no. People asked if we were siblings. We told them we weren’t. I couldn’t blame the other kids for their rumors or assumptions. Even to us, our relationship was strange. It developed rapidly and deeply, to the point where I couldn’t imagine a world without him in it. It was as if the universe was proud of me and David was my reward. Each moment we spent together felt special. The therapists separated us every day because we weren’t supposed to make friends in the hospital. That didn’t stop us. Day after day, I arrived first and saved him the seat he sat in on his first day.
One morning, David didn’t walk through the door. He didn’t come in late. He was gone. The seat next to me remained empty and cold. When he disappeared from the hospital, my universe crumbled around me. My mind immediately assumed the worst. The unsaid truth about kids in the hospital, is that they could be snatched from this earth overnight. People got better or they died. That’s how the hospital worked.
Phones had to be turned in every morning at check-in so I had no way of contacting David. My only option was to sit and wait until I was released. The incessant ticking of the clock had never seemed louder or more prominent.
Unfocused and unmotivated, I struggled through the day. I sat in the therapy circles, ate all my food, and played ‘good little patient’ until a check-out form was placed in my lap. I filled it out in a rush, my writing nearly unreadable. Before I could turn it in and retrieve my phone, I heard my name announced. My head snapped towards the door where my case manager stood. Automatically, I got up and let her lead me to an office. Briefly, I thought about how easy it was not to think for yourself.
Nerves started to physically affect me, causing unwanted adrenaline to course through my veins. My case manager had always been rude to me. She always took my mother’s side and believed every lie about me she was fed. When I sat down in the office and she began talking, I wasn’t paying much attention to her. I thought that I didn’t really care about what she had to say. As soon as I heard “text from another patient” I hung onto every word. My defense systems were activated and I began to act. Being someone I wasn’t to avoid heart shattering pain was my specialty.
“We don’t allow patients to interact outside of the program because of peer influence. Two teenagers with depression can only provide fuel for each other’s depression,” my case manager stated.
That assumption was infuriatingly ignorant. Two patients with cancer don’t produce more carcinogens by being friends. My first instinct was to shout, but I remained quiet. The look I was giving my case manager told her more than any words would.
“I’m going to have to ask you to delete his phone number.”
Those words hurt more than any cut or burn ever could. Panic set into my body and tears welled up behind my eyes. I didn’t let them out. If I let them out, she was in control. I couldn’t let her take control.
“Who I hang out with is not your business,” I argued half-heartedly.
“While you are under this hospital’s care it is.”
I opened my mouth to argue with more force. I stopped myself once it occurred to me that my case manager might know about David’s safety. Carefully formulating my words, I sat in thought for a few seconds.
“What about David? Did you already talk to him about this?”
“David was discharged yesterday.”
I let tears fall from my eyes in a moment of weakness. Any type of front I had put up had been knocked down. My cries were loud and forceful, shaking my whole body. David was okay. The only reason he didn’t show up was because he had already been discharged. That was all that mattered to me. For the first time in a long time, I cried tears of happiness instead of pain.
I hastily deleted his number and assured my case manager I would not speak to him again. She thanked me for understanding and doing what was right. The first thing I did when I walked out the hospital doors was make a new phone contact for David Beck, using the number from messages that hadn’t been deleted. If there was one fact I was sure of in this miserable world, it was that I never quit. I wouldn’t quit on David just because someone told me to. Doing what I was told never was one of my strengths.
I was discharged the next day. My case manager had no idea I still talked to David. In the eyes of the hospital, I was stable enough to go back into the world. I wouldn’t say that I agreed with them, but I did feel a lot better. I no longer felt incomplete. The holes in my mind started to fill themselves in.
Meeting David didn’t cure me. His presence in my life simply helped me realize that being sad does not make happy things less delightful. Slitting your wrists does not dim the sunshine and wanting to die does not make flowers wilt. Losing a friend does not mean you won’t meet someone a thousand times better for you. Nothing stopped for my sadness and nothing ever would. The world goes on. As I took my final step out of the hospital, I went on too.