Committed.

Committed.
         You’re never hungrier than when you’re sitting in the emergency room of a St. Louis hospital, decked out in baby blue scrubs, with the only article of clothing they let you keep being your boxers. That’s all the mind will think about in a situation like that. When are they gonna bring the sandwich they promised over an hour ago? Of course it doesn’t help that lunch was supposed to be more than two hours ago. Two hours should have seen me in line with friends for whatever the cafeteria was serving that day, but three hours ago saw me lying to my counselor just so I could drop out of college. It’s pretty disconcerting to see yourself dressed all in one color. I’d always been a stickler for blue, it was one of my four favorites, but navy had always won out over this pastel garbage. I was waiting to see if I would have to be shipped up to their mental ward, not creatively announcing to my family that my girlfriend and I were expecting a baby boy.
         
“Are you okay? That’s what matters right now, just tell me are you okay? I’m on my way to work now, but I can be there tonight if you want me to pick you up,” my dad says over the phone.
         “No dad I’m fine, but thanks. Seriously. I just want to hang out with my friends for a couple more days and pretend like things are normal before I come back. And I’m going to see my counselor in a couple hours so things will be fine. I just wanted to wake up and call you and mom before you had work, I just got off the phone with her.”
         I’m sure I had just caused several hairs to be pulled out of his already thinning supply, that’s not the way anyone should start a morning. And I know he would have come down to pick me up, the drive is just over two hours, but he would have had to work his morning meeting’s first, and I really did want to hang out around the campus a little longer.
         Crawling back into my girlfriend’s bed, she mumbled, “How did it go?” I’d met Madeleine my second day at college, and although her plan wasn’t to date anybody until her junior year, we were going out before fall break. Even with the little puddle of drool on the pillow next to her, it was nice having her there after telling both my parents I couldn’t even make it through a year of school. “Fine, it went about as good as it could go. They were both just surprised,” I reply. I brushed her hair off my pillow and fell back asleep.

         “I’ve decided I am, I’m gonna take the medical leave that you told me about. I need the rest of this semester off and maybe I’ll be back in the fall. But I’m done now. I need to take this break. I already feel better now that I’ve decided.”
         Sitting in my counselor’s office at Saint Louis University, I stared blankly at the dog poster that seemed to be a fixture on the wall. It was March, and yet the calendar still showed the Cocker Spaniel lying by a turkey that it had when I first came to this room at the end of November. I liked this room though, despite it being stuck in the past. I liked my counselor, Jessica, too. I hadn’t chosen her. She just happened to be the one available to talk when I first came in. I’d never had a counselor before, and she had been the textbook image of one. She had perfected the sad, caring smile that prompted more and more out of me each time I went. That’s part of the reason I had to lie. If I was going to have problems, they were going to be serious ones.
          “Is there any event that prompted this? I just want to know where your head is at now,” she asked. Her long, blonde hair cascaded down over her shoulder as she tilted her head to the side.
I had to practically shout to be heard over the jumbled mess of noise that went on in that emergency room. I ask Sarah, “Thankskilling? Have you ever seen that one? Oh god it’s so great, just imagine a group of friends with a three day weekend, a camera, and a couple hundred bucks to make a movie. You have to watch it.” Sarah jotted this down on the list she had started half an hour ago, sitting here in the emergency room talking about movies so bad they have to be watched.
“What about Blubberella? 700 pound vampire woman battles Nazis with the Allies,” Sarah counters.
This is how we passed the time in the emergency room, in between me telling a steady stream of doctors and nurses why I had been sent there. Neither one of us had known each other before that day, and I would never see her again. It had been Saint Louis University’s idea to send her with me. However, I had a strong need to keep her entertained, even though she still had her phone and I didn’t.
“Hobo with a Shotgun? Best pickup lines you’ll ever hear,” I replied. Sarah laughed and added another title to the list.

         By the time they brought me up to the mental ward in a wheelchair, Sarah had been gone for close to 45 minutes, I’d finally gotten a plastic wrapped nightmare of a sandwich, and the story that had resulted with me getting sent here had been told four times already. The nurse responsible for wheeling me up to this top floor of the hospital was about to be number five, but the fact that she brought two cheeseburgers and some juice for me to drink while I told her the abridged version of the story easily made her my favorite.
         Half of the first cheeseburger still in my mouth I started, “I lied to both my roommates and my friends that night, they each thought I was hanging out with the other group. Having a car I was able to drive to the Walmart where I spent about half an hour walking around the store, avoiding the area with knives. But I really fucking wanted to go get one. The feeling passed though and I headed back to my dorm. That’s when I decided I was gonna take a medical leave. When I told my counselor about that night though, she sent me down here to get evaluated, and even though I’ve told all the doctors I feel fine they made me stay here for the night which kinda really sucks because I wanna see my friends before I leave. But whatever.”
         She asked me, “Are you okay now?” She patted my knee and seemed to take a little more weight onto her shoulders. “We will help you with this.”
And although she looked nothing like my mom, short and having clearly enjoyed plenty of meals, the look she gave me before heading out the door was filled with a sadness that let me know she was a mother herself. It almost made me tell her the truth.

         What doctor had decided to stick me in a mental ward surrounded by a bunch of people that I didn’t know? I’d said I was fine repeatedly. Whichever doctor it was should spend a night on the ward themselves and have their head examined. Sitting in the lobby, all of my attention was given to the TV on the far wall, where WWE Wrestling was the only show on. All I could focus on were the people on the screen pretending to wrestle, while I’m there pretending that I wasn’t on the verge of pissing my pants in terror if anyone approached me. The only person I talked to the rest of that night was my nurse, Dan, who approached me by saying, “I looked at your file and I swear to God if you’re from the New Berlin of the pretzel mascot notoriety, I’m gonna lose my shit and have to get an autograph.”
         He’s shorter than me, and already balding, but I’m instantly jealous of him because his scrubs are a dark navy blue, much better than mine. I reply, “Unfortunately I am, beware my Pretzel Power.” I twist my fingers into the shape of a pretzel, a popular trick we all learned at basketball games.
         He leaned back, as if stretching as he laughed. “I hear that you’re planning on going back home for awhile. I spent some time in Springfield and I can understand why you left in the first place, it’s boring as all hell there. Maybe you should just stay here, we’ve got way more activities going on.”
         With that, and the anxiety pills he gave me to help me forget that my roommate was screaming at the person whose bed I was taking as I first came onto the ward, he had quickly become my favorite nurse. My apologies to the nurse who brought me the food, but pills triumph.

         “Everyone that talked to you yesterday was a little worried, and when we communicated with your parents, they thought it would be best if we committed you to the ward for at least the night, possibly a week,” says the head doctor of the mental ward. He’s thin enough that a fan set on high would probably send him reeling, and he didn’t blink the whole time he talked to me.
         Committed. That wasn’t a natural talent of mine, committing. No relationship has lasted more than a year, my college choice was made on the last day possible, and no color can even claim the sole right of being my favorite. Now sticking to this story has led to me being stuck in this mental ward. For possibly a week? They had said it would just be for the night, that a talk with a doctor, this exact doctor who was staring at me now, would happen in the morning, and then my mom would be waiting in the lobby, fresh from Chicago, to pick me up and take me home. Now there I was with this doctor, and another older grizzled one sitting behind him, and he had just possibly extended my sentence, instead of concluding it like I had been promised.
         
         A fight had broken out while I was talking to the doctors, and nobody was being allowed in the lobby while they cleaned it up and defused the situation. The only other patient trapped in this part of the ward with me was an older guy, Hank, who was missing half of his teeth and had a beard that had only been shaved on one-half of his face.
         “The big black chick, ya know, the real fat one, picked up a fucking chair and threw it at the less fat one. Fucking hurled it at her,” Hank said. His voice was much higher than I would have expected, almost shrill. I tried to peek through the door to confirm this, but couldn’t see past the hallway.
         “Oh damn, that would have been kinda fun to see. A little like the wrestling last night,” I reply. He had thrown a fit when it was turned off for lights out.
         He chuckled, almost absently. “Fucking shit’s crazy man, they’re all goddamn insane down there. Whatcha even in here for?”
         I was more than a little self-conscious the whole time I was on that ward, but especially at that moment. I tell him, “Suicidal thoughts, And I guess some anxiety.”
         “Ahh shit you can’t do that man. You got to go out there and live buddy. I’m in here cuz some asshole heard me tell my boss I was gonna kill him. It was either this or fucking jail and I ain’t going back there. I’ve gotta talk to my girlfriend in code on the phone though. Just like fucking jail, how they’ve got them on that wall, the nurses hear everything. Just like I’m back in fucking jail, but with better food. You have the cheeseburgers yet? Better than McDonalds,” he replied. Then the doors were opened and he headed off to survey the wreckage.

         The threat of a week ended up being just a threat, and the original plan was stuck to, with me being walked, not wheeled out of the ward to my mom waiting in the downstairs lobby later that day. We went to Arby’s where she became the sixth person in two days to hear about my trip to Walmart looking for knives. People don’t normally look that sad eating curly fries. I could see the wrinkles I had added to her face.
         I told you I’m no good at committing to things, seeing them through, and that’s always been the case. But there’s one thing I did stick to, and that’s the lie I told my counselor, family, friends, and I swear just about every doctor and nurse in the hospital. You see, I didn’t go walk around Walmart avoiding knives that night. I sat around with friends, watching a movie and having a couple of beers. I’d made the decision to leave school on the walk over to their dorm, and kept it to myself for the next couple of days. Now don’t get me wrong, I was depressed, suicidal, and I needed to leave. I made the right choice, but in my head I needed to have a grand reason to justify dropping out of college. That’s where my created trip to Walmart came into play. It just worked a little too well. You might think I’m crazy for committing to a lie that ended me in a mental ward for a night, but once I had said it, I couldn’t take it back. If I had tried, I might still be there now.

         There was an art therapy session on the ward, and although it had already been determined that I would be released in just an hour or two, attendance was mandatory. Up until that point, I had viewed the ward as Them vs Me, Crazy vs Sane, and I had been scared. But sitting there around the same table as all of these people who had severe mental conditions, drawing pictures to represent our feelings, I stopped seeing the distinction. Although I wasn’t suicidal at the moment, if someone is depressed, it’s a mental condition and they need help, just like any other. The problem is knowing when it’s needed. Both the university and the doctors at the hospital had been quick to shove me in a new, frightening environment when I had just made a monumental decision and should have been around people I knew. Yes, they were looking out for me, but nobody seemed to hear me say I was fine.
         An older black lady came up to me before I left and handed me the picture she had drawn during art therapy, saying, “Listen son, I am your mother, and that man is your father. We are the parents of everyone. If you type the numbers on here into a computer, you will receive millions of dollars. Just don’t kill yourself child. We love you.”
         The nurses and the doctors told me they were there to help me, but the patients, the mental ward patients, were the only ones who told me not to kill myself. They know what actually needs to be heard.