DEAR ORPHEUS

Athina Pia Barreda

 The psychiatric ward is not at all what I expected. It is spacious. Clean, but not sterile. The walls and decor suggest care. Both proper and methodical. Designed to serve a purpose. The food tastes familiar. It feels specific. Catered. Like it was made for me.

Or like I was made to be here.

The doctors and nurses smile at me with their eyes, with a warmth on their faces. They know me. They know things about me that I have not told anyone, not since you. Not since you left.

Even the sound of their voices, the tone and the cadence, serves a purpose. To remind me of you. Of your presence. Your existence that once touched mine.

I know you watch as I write this in my room. I see a camera to my left. There are multiple cameras hidden in my room. All to watch me. All to see if I remember you. For you to see me remember what I did to you.

I remember. Clearly. I continue to write. This is my confession to you, dear Orpheus.

You want me to react. To scream that I am not insane. You expect me to reject the medication. But I do not mind the pills. They taste like the peppermint candies you used to give me when we were children.

I have always loved you, dear neighbor. When you and your family moved across the street, I was ecstatic. I saw in you a friend. My best friend. Your blonde hair, light as corn silk. Your eyes, blue as the ink we used in school. When I saw you from my front yard, I fell in love with you.

I remember that you were shy at first. You stuttered when you were nervous. Still I felt your gentle soul. How kind and expressive you were. I would bring my fairytale books to your house, and we would spend hours reading them together. Discussing our thoughts like the little thinkers we were.

Eventually you no longer stuttered. When I asked you if fairytales could come true, you promised me one day that you would give me a fairytale.

Do not think I have forgotten.

I was so unruly then. I believed that every injustice I saw had to be corrected.

So let me tell you that I have done you an injustice. I laughed at you when you confessed your love to me when we were fourteen. Do not think I did not know how the boys back then reacted to me. I know they liked me as a girl. I know you did too. Even before you told me.

I know this laugh insulted you. Made you think you were a forever friend. That I had led you on.

I wish to tell you why I did what I did in my own voice. Hearing yours, for how I have missed it. For years I have waited, feared that you had forgotten me. And now here I am, in this psych ward I know you have built for me. All to make me remember you. All to make me love you.

But I have always loved you.

I see the camera to my left. I know there are others. All to watch me. All to see if I remember.

You expect me to scream. To claw at the orderlies. To be difficult. Because difficulty would mean I am still fighting. And my fighting would mean I still believe there is something to fight for.

But I take the pills. They taste of peppermint. Of you.

The nurses come. They ask questions. I answer.

Do you hear voices?

Only yours. But I do not say that.

Do you feel safe?

I feel watched.

Do you want to hurt yourself or others?

I want to hurt the version of myself that laughed at you in the mud. But she is already dead. I killed her myself, slowly, over the course of a decade. You were just not there to see it.

You are Orpheus.

You believe this. The lover who descends. The one who cannot help but look back.

But Orpheus walked into hell willingly. Eurydice did not choose the snake. She did not choose the dark. She was walking, simply walking, and then she was gone.

I was walking. I was fourteen years old, standing in the mud behind the garages, and you were on one knee, and I laughed because the only other sound in my body was a scream.

Not a scream of fear. A scream of want. A scream that said yes, yes, yes so loudly I thought my ribs would crack.

I laughed to keep the scream inside. I laughed to keep myself from grabbing your face with both hands.

You think I rejected you.

I rejected the part of myself that you were never supposed to see.

They will come soon. The night nurse. The paper cup. The peppermint.

I will swallow. I will sleep. I will dream of the oak tree. I will dream of your hand in mine.

And when I wake, I will look into the camera. And I will write again.

You are watching me now. You must be. Because the alternative is too large to hold.

That I am here alone. That you have forgotten me. That you are married, or living in another city, or dead. That these walls are just walls. That these cameras are just cameras. That the peppermint is just peppermint. That I have built an entire world out of nothing but my own need to be seen by you.

That alternative is not possible. I refuse it.

And that is a story I cannot tell.

Love,

Eurydice