Clover hearted

Surreal, strange, sometimes senseless

TW: psych hospitals, addiction to drugs, overdose, hallucinations, suicide
A chapter written during a time in my life in which I felt lost, this and these next few chapters were written in the psych ward after a drug overdose, very raw, rambling, and unsteady. A lot of trying on different narratives to see what fits, attempting to write something uplifting even when I didn't feel that way, and capturing the confliction/uncertainty I was experiencing.

One day at a time
You're sitting in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling reliving the past few days, the aching of your shoulders when your boyfriend broke up with you, the blurry vision when you overdosed, and the way your mother sounded when you left.
You ask yourself how you're going to do it again, how you'll pull the roots of your addiction, it's a strange feeling looking at an existence of pain and asking yourself if you're going to do it again.
You've tried to get better, you got the monthly sober chips, the rehab stays, the 12 steps, another twenty four hour chip seems like a promise any amount of logic cannot give you, a promise of a lifetime of sobriety, of a life without another relapse, it's not a promise you can make honestly.
What you can say is that today you'll try, today you'll give the objective of getting better an honest effort.

Making sense of the senseless
The truth is difficult to understand, endlessly changing past what can be defined.
Reality folds in on itself, reality is understood only to be re-understood and re-understood.
You understand the truth until you try to change it, until it appears to be something else, because it is different than it was last week, until it goes back and forth too many times to know where reality lies.
You believe you understand what's in front of you until you watch it change in front of your eyes.
Endlessly questioning and redefining and rewriting, where is reality?
What am I to trust when everything is senseless?
In this moment I look at everything that stays, the things that have not departed.
My parents remained with me through all my peaks and valleys, congratulating me when I made it further than I thought I would, and rubbing my back when I was aching in the night.
Poetry has remained with me throughout all my stories, the sunny and lighthearted, the lost and stumbling, the dramatic and colorful.
I'll keep praying, I'll ask god to guide me, to keep me sober, to show me the way.
I'll keep the part of me that wants to improve near to my heart, ever reminding me that I want to get better.

1st day at the psych ward
You talk with one of the nurses, you joke with her,you tell her you used to be well behaved, she tells you that you still are.
You lay on the couches sucking your thumb, they tell you they have to do a skin check, you need to undress, you panic but they treat you with kindness.
You arrive at the ward, you talk with two kind women about music, the things you like to do, you talk about addiction.
A man gives you a tarot card reading, he tells you he is polyamorous, he tells you he chose his name because it sounds like a pun.
There is a man who makes bird sounds, he asks the tarot card reader how he can find his identity
You start to hear voices, you rock yourself and stare at the ceiling, you're starting to feel crazy, like you've earned your bed here.
You eat chocolate cake, you write with bendable pens. You read a letter you wrote to yourself. You talk about poetry. You thank the nurses.

Disoriented
It all feels like a surreal and senseless dream, something you can't quite explain.
Your vision is blurry, the world appears grainy on a tv screen, it doesn't look real, not quite yet.
You tell the people at the psych ward how you were before you got here, surely you were well behaved before.
You try to be uplifting, to talk about positive and happy things.
Nothing feels concrete, you are unsteady at your core, at least you are at the moment, you know in a general sense, you are more confused than anything. You don't know what you are.
You're laughing, you're giggling, smiling, you're wondering if there's any point in trying. You're honest about it, at least.
You're showing the people the poem you adore most in the book you brought with you.
You don't know what comes next, you don't know what any of it means.