Note: this work is completely fiction, any likeness is purely coincidence.
Alarms sound, I'm startled. My eyes burst open, light comes flooding in. I survey my surroundings and it's not much. Other than the single bed with white sheets that I'm lying on, there's only a barren grey desk in the corner and a tattered black rocking chair near the door. Why the rocking chair, made of wood, was black, I never understood. I get up and walk to the door, which is shut. I open it and look out. My dad, a short man of about 5 foot 2 inches is standing on a chair with a copy of People magazine in his hand. The issue is from several years earlier, back when my mother used to buy them religiously. We haven't had a recent issue since she died. He is fanning the smoke detector on the ceiling. The alarm is going off. My dad just looks at me as if t say "well, it's not MY fault!". He wobbles on the chair and releases the magazine in order to grab the top of the chair's back rest to stop himself from falling over. The magazine falls and lands with a thud on my head. It isn't very heavy, but it does knock me down. As I fall, I close my eyes. In the darkness, all I feel is pain, head pain. It rapidly grows into screaming, piercing pain. I try to scream, but nothing comes out. Then, as quickly as it grows, the pain is gone. I feel numb and content. I open my eyes.
I'm lying in a too small bed with huge plastic rails on each side of me. There are buttons on the rails. One has a white plus sign on a red background. Above it the word "NURSE" is written. I look around, the room smells like a mixture of hand sanitizer and play doh. Other than the blandly tan walls, there are clowns and happy faces all over the floor and the borders of the walls. I'm in a children's wing of some hospital. My head has a dull pain in it, like an elderly grave digger that can't work any faster than slowly. In my right forearm is a tube. Following the tube to a bad that is full of clear liquid that is slowly dripping into the tube, into my body, into my soul. It's quiet. Then a small child cries from somewhere in the wing. Probably a very young kid. Probably a nightmare. I wondered if that child had their mom there to hold them, tell them everything would be okay. The door to my room opened. It was a silent open, no creaks. In walked my mother. She hadn't died yet, that wouldn't happen for another year: she'd go shopping for a dress for a special date with dad, she'd walk across the road to get to here car and would be hit by a drunk on his way to the liquor store. My mom, noticing that I was awake, sat down in a rock hard chair beside my bed. She looked tired, but as beautiful as the day she and my dad married. Where was dad? Why wasn't he here, with mom and I, while I was in the hospital? I knew why I was here. I was having a severe allergic reaction to some antibiotics I had just started taking. Suddenly, I felt it. A rumbling in the pit of my stomach. My head began to pound, my heartbeat in my ears. If was coming, closer, closer, closer, until...
Then, it was over, the puking that is, the self-hate wasn't. It was still ever so present. I check the time: 4:40. Dad wouldn't be home for another hour, at least, not that it really mattered. I only had to be careful for another 2 months, then I would graduate from high school and head off to university, where I could do whatever I wanted, every dirty little secret, without having to worry about being walked in on. I felt it again, that need, the need to make myself feel clean. I felt the same thing everytime right before I emptied everything out, hoping it would satisfy it, but it never did. And once again, I felt it, the entire time thinking to myself: maybe it'll be this time that it ends.
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