To be torn from that is maddening. To know it lives on the other side of this impenetrable wall is heartbreak, torture, madness, suffering that makes death seem a sweet promise.
Who sentenced me to this? I did it myself to myself. I know that.
The treatment occurs every six hours, exactly, without exception.
When I know myself, I understand this. I can explain it. The level of medication in the blood has to be managed very carefully. Too much would be toxic to me. Too little and the organism will survive, possibly become more robust.
But each time the door clanks and I see the bodies in yellow suits of untearable fabric (I have tried its strength) and then the plexiglass masks that turn the faces behind them to distorted whorls of pink, the need to get away is all there is. As if that insistent heartbeat I hear from a distance rushed in through the open door and swelled to make the air shout, I charge toward the opening in the door.
They hold me securely. I lash, but there are many of them. They pin me on a stretcher. One takes some blood from my arm and another pushes a syringe into the meat of my thigh.
There’s a sedative in there, or else I would rush with them to the door, and they would have to beat me back to keep me in this room any longer.
Suddenly unbalanced and lethargic, my body pins me down, and I watch hope wink and extinguish in the hastily shut door.
Why do I record this now? Why do I, or the remnant of me that survived being torn from all meaning, write when the exercise seems so paltry and fruitless compared to the enormity I have known? I cannot write of that known secret—it cannot fit in words. To try is desecration. Much of the time I do not care for anything on this side of the wall. I only long to rejoin… But at other times, for a few minutes, like the quiet mouse stepping amidst sleeping lions, this other clear-minded self takes the pen. It is the wish of my other self, my past self, to observe what I am now experiencing. It is the desire to know. That is why I did this to myself in the first place.
The treatment is having the effect my persecutors would wish. (Let us not forget that I, myself, am one of these persecutors. Indeed, I laid out this regimen. I must have. I would have wanted to control this exactly.)
The love that once felt so heartbreakingly near is sometimes as dubious as any memory. I could almost imagine life without it.