Spring was boiling over into summer, the week I was in the mental hospital. Two police officers escorted me to the cruiser and spoke through the opaque divider separating me from where they sat up front. The one driving had a stutter and walked beside me with a crooked gait. In the passenger’s seat sat another officer with thin, dark hair, Asian features, and a thick Boston accent. The man with a stutter asked me about myself, what year of college I was in, what I was studying, and if I was looking forward to graduation. I answered pleasantly, but my voice was muffled through the plastic. I stared out the barred windows until we reached the intake building.

Two paramedics wheeled a woman on a stretcher through the door. She lay back silently, strapped into the bed at her legs and waist with her arms unmoving on top of the white sheets. How do you go on living with razors, pills, and tall buildings on the mind? How do you make a cup of coffee, tie your shoes, walk to class? As I approached the entrance, I knew I was about to find out. I was taken away from the world of smiling faces and pleasant conversation. I was removed like a bruised fruit on a supermarket display. I was grateful. I would return when I was fixed, when everything bitter and sharp inside of me was cut away and I could return to real life. I know now that the self can be undone in an instant.

***

There are several species of insects known to kill themselves. The sting of a honeybee, a self-destructive defense mechanism, is lethal to the insect as the stinger detaches from the body pulling most of the abdomen out with it. A species aptly named the “exploding ant” can spontaneously rupture an internal sac releasing a caustic chemical to deter other insects and predators. Worker ants have been shown to self-sacrifice by abandoning the colony, a way to ensure certain death, when infected with a lethal fungus to protect their nestmates from a similar infection. The psychologist Thomas Joiner writes that there is a necessary habituation to death before suicide. There is a death-worth-more-than-life calculus at play. The combination of alienation and burdensomeness makes an action that seems incomprehensible feel inevitable. Death is a fearsome prospect. There’s something fearless about the honeybee that terrifies me. Maybe he should be more afraid, more selfish. Joiner asks the honeybee, “what is fearlessness like?”

What makes you think I wasn’t afraid?

***

I knew him when he still went by Nora. We gathered in the dance studio, laid down our mats, and muddled through the required yoga class each week. We met in the late afternoon, after a day of running between classes, and settled into the stillness of the room. The P.E. teacher drew the blackout curtains across the floor-to-ceiling windows. We put our mats next to each other, flush against the wooden floor, creaking slightly when we shifted our weight. I closed my eyes, peaking over at him from time to time to see if he had his eyes closed too. The smell of eucalyptus drifted through the air. The teacher liked to dab the scented oil on her hands and wrists near the end of class. This smell made its way into my clothes even when we stood to leave, changing out of our blue P.E. shorts and gray t-shirts printed with the school’s mascot.

When we came back the next school year, he went by Emmett. I’ll never know how he chose the name. We weren’t close enough for me to ask. In truth, we weren’t friends at all. He was just another quiet kid who floated between friend groups, never spoke in class, didn’t call attention to himself. When his parents held the funeral, I didn’t go. I felt like I didn’t know him well enough. No one ever said it out loud, but it was whispered with heads bent together and eyes darting back and forth. It was understood that he killed himself. Someone made rubber bracelets with his name on them and passed them out to the kids in our grade. We never spoke about him again.

It was years ago now, but I swear I can still hear him breathing. I lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling, counting as I breathed in—one two three four—holding my breath with my lungs full to bursting, then breathed out—one two three four—praying for calm to return to my body. I felt the heaviness of the past like a stone on my chest. I squeezed my eyes shut tighter until I saw flashes of color and red-tinged darkness behind my eyelids. I imagined Emmett lying on the floor next to me. We were flat on our backs with our eyes closed. Corpse pose, our teacher called it. But in the mind of a high-schooler, we would live forever. I saw his belly rise and fall gently as if he had fallen asleep. I heard his breathing, steady and measured, effortless.

***

The door to the common room slammed closed, trembling on its hinges as a draft from the window pushed and pulled through the suffocating heat. In the lopsided circle of chairs, ten faces stared at their socks, at faded posters with quotes and affirmations, paintings taped up against the blank white walls, or simply at nothing at all. A young girl with brown, matted hair down to her waist. A woman in a wheelchair with a thin, nasal voice. A middle-aged man who never changed out of his hospital gown, the green checkered robe coming up to his knees.

A woman shook her foot, leg, and entire body with her eyes glued to the door. It slammed shut again and we both flinched. She was a racehorse in its box, terror in her eyes, nostrils flaring, just waiting to bolt, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. There was something about her fear that quieted mine. There was something about her unashamed display of anxiety that expressed my own unspoken fear. She was losing her mind so I didn’t have to.

As we sat in the common room, we were like children again. Burying ourselves with sand up to our chins in an elementary school sandbox. The sand was cool to the touch, shaded from the afternoon sun. It shifted and moved with me as I breathed. I wiggled my fingers and toes just to make sure they were still there. The sand was clean. It flowed over our bodies, into our clothes, into our homes as we tracked it into the house, sitting on the floor pulling off our shoes, pouring a day’s worth of sand into a little pile on the ground. Unmoving in the sand, I was dormant, resting, and full of potential. I felt a buzzing energy beneath my skin knowing that at any moment I could stand up, the sand would fall away, and I would be made anew.

I’ve always been able to dig my way out. But now, I’ve fallen into something I can’t seem to write myself out of. It is something that keeps the sand trickling back in from all sides no matter how fast I dig. I was afraid if I kept at it I’d find my own bones buried there. I was afraid of what might happen if I stopped digging for even a moment. If I let the sand fill my eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. I could rest here, letting the cool sand brush against my cheeks, kiss my eyelids, and settle over me with finality.

***

I woke up early the next morning and stripped the sheets from my bed. It was the day of my discharge. It was the day of my college graduation. Walking through the hallway, I felt the beaming faces of the patients around me, faces I mistakenly thought were empty, now smiling at me and my second chance. These were the faces I sat across from at breakfast sipping their decaf coffee, complaining about the food, sharing bits and pieces of their lives. They had known me for only a week and yet remembered my face, my name, and cared about my future outside of the hospital. They congratulated me on my way to the med line and stopped to say their goodbyes while waiting for their vitals. They were happy for me even when they struggled to be happy themselves. When I walked across the stage that day with my diploma, I thought back to them.

I stood on the curb in front of the hospital holding all my belongings in a brown paper bag. I imagined my family out there sitting on the bleachers shading their eyes from the sun. My friends, draped in black and parading around the stadium, held their heads high. I only looked back once while I was getting into the car. I read the side of the building. Proctor Hall. Floor Two. I was glad to know where I had been.

I was late to the ceremony. While thousands of students sat on folding chairs listening to the commencement speaker give some rousing address, I was back in my dorm room draping my black robe over my head, attaching the hood, gold at the throat, and sitting silently on the bare mattress of my bed. The dorm was empty now. My roommates had packed the week before. A few hours ago, I had been on fifteen-minute safety checks restricted to the ward. Now, I was about to step out onto the field, squinting in the sunshine, wandering through a mass of black robes and searching for a chair with my name on it. I could almost forget I had even been gone at all. I could return to who I was before all this craziness happened. I could wash away the past year from my mind, from the minds of my friends and family, and restore their happy version of me. No, I want to remember.

I must grapple with the fact that I have changed. That I will never be who I once was or thought I should be. I must be who I am now, and that is the hardest part. I thought when I finally emerged from that hospital room with its cafeteria trays and paper-thin sheets, I would be transformed. I would see things for how they truly were and feel the weight fall from my shoulders. I would dust off the sand from my clothes and walk out of this life into something better, someplace with clarity, and tree-lined avenues, and no pain. The writer Natalie Goldberg wrote that anything we do fully is an alone journey. I was caught on those words—an alone journey. Sometimes I am unhappy. I try to make peace with myself for my unhappiness. I try to forgive myself. Maybe I am omitting details even now in fear that you will turn away in disgust or contempt. Maybe I am framing this story to cast myself in the most sympathetic light. Maybe I am forcing a happy ending because that’s what I think you want. But the truth is crawling up my throat threatening to be spoken.

Rachel Paz Ruggera (she/her) is a research technician in a developmental biology lab and holds a BS in Biology from Boston College. Her work is published or is forthcoming in Atticus Review, The Writing Disorder, LEVITATE, Idle Ink, and Feels Blind Literary.