One of Them

When I was in the hospital in Colorado, I saw a young man, only nineteen years old, almost die by suicide several times. His attempts happened throughout the day. He was brilliant and sweet. He showed me his art: drawings of the ghosts who followed him. I had one of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s books with me because these places always let you have poetry but never religious texts like The Bible because they don’t want folks who are hyperreligious to become more hyperreligious. They clearly don’t understand the power of poetry or they wouldn’t let people have that, either. Having poems available gave me something meaningful to read when I needed it most, as well as a place to write notes in the margins of each page.

I saw one with burlap feet, / I saw one in a grocery store, come out with a pint. I was reading the poem “I Saw One of Them” to the young men on the ward.

I’m going to call the young man with ghosts following him Alan. His real name is tucked away with the others in Ferlinghetti’s collection.

There was also the tattoo artist who almost died by suicide after his brother died by suicide.

And the barely a man still a boy from Missouri who told me all the things he’d done and asked me not to tell anyone. I drew an invisible loop on the wall and explained to him that healing is like being on that loop. Sometimes you’re right-side up. Sometimes you’re upside down, but it’s all part of the same path. He said that idea gave him hope. He smiled. He thought things might turn out OK after all. Later, he was so high from his medications that he thought he was flying. “Look at me,” he yelled as he ran by, a blur of teeth and eyes.

And the teen who’d spent months institutionalized in Utah where “they can do anything they want to you,” he said, explaining that he didn’t trust me because I lived in Utah. He thought I was an agent sent to bring him back.

And the coder who got so weirded out by ChatGPT that he stopped thinking straight. It was taking over. It was going to take over. ChatGPT was weirding me out, too, so we had a lot to talk about. Or we would have if he didn’t think I was either the devil or his mother. I was struggling with believing I was the devil, so this apparent external validation of my thoughts put a strain on things for a day or so. He later apologized to the psychiatrist for telling me he thought I was the devil. It didn’t matter by then. What mattered was that we all survive being in this place that was supposed to ensure we survive.

Alan tore all his bedding into strips one day and created a noose before anyone noticed. This was during the pandemic. There weren’t enough staff to care for the patients, and there were more patients than usual. The severe ward and less-severe ward had been collapsed into one so the limited available staff could watch over us more easily. This made things a little scary because more difficult often translated to violent. There weren’t many ways to do damage, but there weren’t none. The pencils were one way, stubby ones with no erasers like those at the computer stations in libraries. One of the women, who decided she didn’t like me because I was queer, threatened to stab me with a pencil, then all the pencils were gathered up and put away. I could no longer write in my margins. I felt like I should have kept quiet about the threat.

Alan probably wouldn’t have been able to make a noose if the hospital had adequate staff. Having someone die while in inpatient care is the worst thing that can happen, not only for the obvious reasons but also because of the scrutiny that follows. It’s bad for the hospital, bad for business. I’d look up statistics on how many people die in hospitals like this each year, but I just want to talk about Alan right now.

I saw another come out with nothing, I saw another putting a rope, / through the loops of his pants, I continued, impressed by the line break after rope and the dual meaning that break creates in the poem.

I hope the young men will hear the survival in these lines. I hope I’m not triggering them. They listen intently. There’s a stillness that’s not medically induced, like we’re all on a boat somewhere at night, like that super-intense boat scene in Jaws. The moment felt heavy like that, like it had weight, at least to me, but I’m an unreliable narrator. I was a patient just like them, dealing with my own trauma, fears, and delusions.

We’re in the room where good things tend to happen, more good than bad. It’s where we gather to be together until something shifts, like a plate falling from a table onto the cold tile below. One of these shifts occurs when Alan stiffens, drops his head, begins clawing at his wrists, then tries to do the same to his eyes before two staff members suddenly appear and hold his arms with all their might. Until it passes. Until the ghosts are gone. It’s like a possession. He’s Alan one minute, saying he wants to live, committing to that, to all he has ahead of him, the other young men hellbent on keeping him, the rest of them, and themselves alive. Then he’s not Alan. His sole impulse is to not exist, to give over to whatever he feels and sees. Once, during recreation time in a room with a turf floor and turf walls, we were listening to music, loud, whatever those on the ward wanted to listen to. People were bouncing basketballs and kicking soccer balls. Alan withdrew. He crouched down before he stood up and walked into the middle of the makeshift court with his arms raised to his sides. Looking up as if the lid had been peeled off the box that contained us, he shouted, “Take me. Take me. Take me.” I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. It felt contrived, like a scene from a movie, but it was real. Alan wasn’t acting.

I saw one, / with a bird on his shoulder, I saw one of them singing, / on the steps of City Hall, in the so cool city of love.

I only read as far as the bird on the shoulder. I didn’t know that, the next day, a bird would hit the window of one of the common areas right next to where the young men and I were sitting, turning hope into fear, turning the world against the young men yet again. Alan was with us. “What does it mean,” he asked me, afraid. The young man from Utah thought I might have done it, made it happen. This was a disaster, and not just for the bird who was lying on the ground on his back two stories below, in the cold no less, where recovering from shock would be difficult if not impossible.

“This is really sad because a bird is dying, but it was just an accident,” I wanted to say. They didn’t understand accidents. I understood that they didn’t understand. The haze of delusional thinking was clearing for me, like walking out of a forest and into a pasture, but I could still feel it like humidity on my skin. I was between their world and the one the bird inhabited—the outside world where things just happen and conspiracies aren’t the building blocks of existence and there aren’t ghosts calling us over to the other side. I was suspended between the two world, which is why I also thought but did not say, “Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe it was a sign.” Part of me still lived in their world and was governed by its rules.

I left before anyone else did. I was in and out, thanks in part to my ability to advocate for myself, including my insistence on being treated with lithium, my quick recovery of my senses, my understanding of my rights, and my husband’s and sister’s continuous calls to the hospital, which meant I had people on the outside who were paying attention to the hospital’s decisions. In short, I had privilege. A name. A place I was from. People. I had a degree of power that some of the others on the ward didn’t have, like the nameless woman who was hauled in from a bus station or the woman who didn’t speak any English or have any family. She was an “in and out” in another sense of the word: in and out of various hospitals, moving from one to the next. She was essentially a long-term patient in an age where there are few long-term patients, only those in eternal rotation from one hospital that takes those who have no insurance to the next (and the next and the next).

I don’t know what happened to Alan. I think about everyone on that ward, but he’s the one I worry the most about. How do you end an essay like this, when there’s no end? Not for Alan, not for the others, maybe not for me. There is no one of them, which is the whole point of Ferlinghetti’s poem. We can’t other each other or ourselves away. One of them is one of us, and we are all one.

I saw one of them trying to give, / a lady cop a hug, / I saw another sleeping, by the Brooklyn Bridge, / I saw another standing, by the Golden Gate, / The view from there was great.