What Even Is Harmony

Leaving Niamh’s apartment I didn’t know when I’d see her again. I could only be thankful for her making a space for me. Giving me her couch to sleep on. Giving me her listening. I walked to the hospital knowing if I never saw her again her understanding, all that she was, would remain a welcoming room I could return to in my mind.1 I would return, however. I would go back to that bar. The dark shadows of its recessed seats and tables were as familiar, in my waking-dreams, to the mess that made my home my own: my home filled out with signs of myself and the clutter I could live with, or as I planned now, to tidy away and set my store in the glorious emptiness, the parched desert made lush again, life to be explored again. My home, my castle and a place from which to sally forth when I wasn’t keeping myself to myself, now renewed and calmed. No longer fearing cameras. Only fearing that it would take ten lifetimes to fully appreciate all that I had.2

As I walked down the same tree lined avenue I had feared people on the day before, with my arm glistening in the sun from the heat and my lazy effort, I knew my body didn’t have the typical feeling of sweat. It wasn’t slick and thick. There was no feeling of disgust as it misted on my skin. Sweat’s purpose was fully found, with the cool morning breeze holding all the potential of the sun on me; drying; lighting; filling; growth. My walk to the hospital had been tinged with anxiety but it was the anxiety of living. The excitement of possibility, when emotions, thoughts, bodily feeling, internal apprehension all swirl in still-seeming water that offers life in its depths; in its vitality.

I pressed the buzzer at the door to the psychiatric day-centre. There was no receptionist waiting to immediately let me in, but that was normal. My appointments were always so early that preparations for the day still hadn’t been completed by the staff.

Beneath the buildings eaves I turned to face against the sun wishing the alcove I stood in was more open to the wind, the horizon. I looked at the sky then dropped my gaze so shining hard was the bright of its blue glare.

The door buzzed. I walked in and acknowledged the sterile quiet of hospital air as necessary. A beneficial peace to recompose in, but artificial and lacking the natural hum of the world easily confused by the insane for a drilling miasma, the world’s tinnitus as it strung you madly along. This was an artificial serenity to step lightly through, to temporarily give into, accede to, not the buzz of a society’s opportunity roaring with life.

The receptionist looked at me. She didn’t smile. She didn’t acknowledge anything about me. “I’ve an appointment with Erin,” I said. She pointed towards the waiting room.

Coming to the door I dwelt on how, again, I was the first person there. Then, turning around the door, I saw my mother.

“Hello,” I said. It was all I could say in comparison to growth of turbulence, a still bubble of existence growing within me to beyond me and telling me I was not another person within the world but its forever watched guest.

“Where were you?” my mother asked.

“Sorry. I didn’t call. I was caught up. I went out. I met someone and just forgot...”

“That’s not what I asked. Where were you? Where did you sleep? Did you even sleep?”

“I slept at a friends.”

“And your house wasn’t burgled?”

I didn’t think my house would be burgled. There was nothing there to take. A hifi, sure. A TV, my computer. All replaceable. An old bike I didn’t use. All irrelevant.

“You left your front door open,” she said.

“I did,” I said.

“Don’t you think you should have locked it?”

I wanted to say, ‘No.’ I wanted to tell her my meaning: the trust I had placed in the world that I needed it, accepted it, welcomed it and that I would offer something to it. Under her steeled gaze my reasons felt minor. No less real, but irrelevant with how some perceive the world to be.3

“Well?” she said.

“I should have called,” I said.

“You should have but you didn’t.”

“Why are you here?” I felt as if only my face existed: a giant mask.

“Why do you think?” she asked.

“To check up on me.”

“Because you disappeared off for a night, didn’t call me, left your house wide open—”

“I closed the door,” I said.

“I pushed it in. Anyone could have,” she said. “And I spent my whole night there, waiting for you, calling you until 3am, when, somehow, I managed to fall asleep.”

“You didn’t need to wait for me,” I said.

“What else was I supposed to do?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“And if I always did nothing, where would you be?”

I fell quiet. My way in the world wasn’t my own. My finding myself the night prior was being taken from me. I was being forced to fit myself into another’s needs, another’s pattern. If I had been selfish then it was in not calling my mother. It was a simple mistake to forget but now it hung in the room, as I sat, and as she folded her arms over a chest high and proud and let her stare bore ahead through tired eyes. Despite her being there in that room it felt like no-one else was.4 I knew I sat next to her but for all reason and logic I might as well have been wandering the streets as I was three weeks prior. That made me all the more unsettled in my seething; not in thoughts of anger or want, or in emotion, fear or hate, or sorrow, but a physical feeling of back and thighs pressed firm against a long wood bench, me pressed hard as an absence against my mother.

Erin—my nurse—walked past the waiting room, turned back and stood in the doorway. She looked like a summer’s morning. She smiled at me. “You’re OK, Natalie?” she said.

“Will I see you now?” I asked.

“The doctor will see you in a few minutes,” she said. She smiled again and left me sitting with my mother as another patient walked in, picked up some of the fliers spread around advertising art therapy, educational prospects and supports, and then sat between me and my mother.

My mother had obviously asked for me to see the doctor. She had pointed out my little error, now grand and overblown, my leaving doubt about myself as I was finding who I could and should be. Of me not ticking off the boxes that would let me recover my health in peace. I had felt close to it the night before. I had felt seen, felt heard. Now, I felt like I was being examined. Too closely. I had been found wanting for making my own way. What could I say to those who presumed to speak for the health that could only be my own making?

Minutes passed. The other patient—who I presume was a patient—flicked through the fliers she picked up, put them back, sat again while my mother clutched at her hands, then laid unclutched hands on her knees, then took a tissue from her handbag and blew her nose. Eventually, the doctor, grey haired and with glasses hanging on a thin interlinking chain, stood at the edge of the doorway. “Natalie,” she said. “Come this way.”

My mother stood and followed us. The doctor paid no notice to her joining me as we all walked into a small room, longer than it was wide with a chair before a desk, simple and bare, apart from my file, a prescription pad and a pen, that was shoved up against the wall. Two chairs sat facing the doctor’s chair and I sat into one.

My mother sat in the other, crossed her legs and let her head fall into one hand—or brought her hand to her head—where her fingers massaged the bridge of her nose. She drew a slow weary breath, halting me as I looked from the doctor to her. She dropped her hands and looked straight at the doctor, ignoring me.

“Your mother told me you went missing,” the doctor said.

“I knew exactly where I was,” I said.5

“There’s no need for your games,” the doctor said. “No-one knew where you were.”

The offence I found in her questions didn’t tempt me to rein in my observations rather they demanded me to finish with them. That I should be done with small incursions, my assertion that all this was my own peaceful walk through the ways I had found, and I would have to admit to a wrong I felt had no meaning.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call. But there was no need to go to my house, to chase me around the world. To come here.”

“Don’t you think you’ve worried people,” the doctor said. “Don’t you think all of us, me, your mother are worried?”

“People have found worry,” I said.

She hesitated, conversation was withheld and its conciliatory tone, hanging between us, continued its change to cold precision as she leafed back through the notes in my file and spoke again. “Two weeks ago you came to us, saw me, telling me there were cameras in your house. That your boyfriend had snuck into the house, placed them there, and watched you while you slept. That if you showed him you were awake he’d force himself on you.”

“Ex-boyfriend,” I said. “And I said I had thoughts telling me that was what happened. I knew it didn’t happen. I knew it was my fears.”

“You told me the TV was talking to you.”

“I said I could interpret messages in it if I thought a certain way.”

“You were in a bad state.”

“I’m not now,” I said.

“Do you think leaving your front door wide open is a considered decision,” she said. “Is that a reasoned action?” I knew I hadn’t left it swinging open, just unlocked.

“Am I in a bad state? Am I not making sense?”

“Why did you leave your front door open?” my mother asked. “Why didn’t you go home to sleep? Why didn’t you call?”

“I was saying I trusted the world,” I said.

“There’s much better ways to say that,” my mother said.

“You, two weeks ago, sitting there, agreed you’d check in with your family. That you’d call them after you took your medication.” The doctor rested her hands in her lap. “You have to take it every day if it’s to have an effect.”

I wanted to nod, to affirm, not her statement, rather my presence as someone partaking in a discussion. I stayed deathly still.

“Are you taking your medication?” the doctor asked.

“I am,” I said.

“Every day?”

“Yes. I know how worried I was, and my family, my mother. I know how much I need them. I am taking them.”

“They’ll take a while to be fully effective. You can’t miss a dose,” the doctor said.

“I’m feeling better every—”

“And until you are fully better I think it’s best if you return home with your mother. She tells me your old bedroom is available and you sleep there when you visit anyway.”

I looked at my mother whose eyes were red-ringed and whose skin seemed loose and fallen. I thought on how the doctor said, “until you are fully better” unable to conceive of time where there was a full better-ness. There would only ever be acceptably, tolerably better. To them I was always sick but I didn’t want to give up my life. I didn’t want to forego the freedom I was finding with each passing day, freedom from madness but equally freedom to be and show the world what I meant.

The tiredness on my mother’s face said that despite all that it was a sacrifice I would have to make.

“OK,” I said.

“You’ll still see the nurse here, and attend groups. You can spend the day in your home in the city and then by the evening return to your family to eat, wash, sleep, look after yourself,” the doctor said as she closed over my file.

“So I’ll go home later today?” I asked.

“Today, I think you should go home with your mother now,” she said. “You can collect anything you need tomorrow after you see the nurse. OK?” she asked. Except she wasn’t asking me she was looking at my mother who nodded and sighed.

“I’m going to say you locked her door?” the doctor said to my mother.

“Of course. And thank you for seeing us this morning. I know it’s not part of your routine,” my mother said.

“It’s the routine of the job,” the doctor said as she smiled a small knowing smile. “And if you stick to a routine, Natalie, you’ll find things a lot easier. Exercise, sleep, eating well, something to occupy you, coming here for the activities and to meet with your nurse, Sarah, is it?” She looked at her notes.

“Erin I said,” but the doctor was already standing. And my mother stood and I had no choice but to end my meeting. My mother shook the doctor’s hand before they both walked out with me trailing behind.

Following my mother out of the hospital I saw Erin, and wanted to stop to speak to her. To reveal the demands being placed on me and share my disappointment in not being trusted. As I walked towards her, on my way to the door, she just smiled and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m here all day, so whenever suits.” Then she picked up some papers from the receptionist’s desk, papers I recognised from the art-therapy sessions, and left down the corridor to the group session rooms.6

On the drive home, in the air conditioned car I only noticed because of how rarely my parents ever used air conditioning, I tried to explain how I had just wanted to return to a world the psychosis had denied me. To spending a day letting it wash me where everyday experience takes me. “I was relaxing. For the first time in months I was relaxed, and calm” I said.

“You can do all that. You can relax,” my mother said. “But you can’t spend the night running around, you can’t leave your front door wide open. You have to take your medication.” She sighed. “Everyone is worried.”7

I restrained my protestations, knowing they were pointless, that I hadn’t left my front door wide open, that it was shut and someone needed to at least press in on it to know it was unlocked. Even if it was foolish to leave my house unsecured the likelihood of someone randomly trying handles was slim. I knew any debate on the merits of risk, of taking a chance and looking for satisfaction from a city that could bless you or curse you without your barest consideration would not go well with someone who took simple stern logic as a matter of base existence. Who couldn’t fathom any logic in me.

I thought on how I wouldn’t be out at night for the considerable future. How I wouldn’t be able to go for a drink during the day without returning to my family who would smell it on my breath, or confuse the light step of a few beers tipsiness for the disorder of someone crazy and a danger to themselves. I wouldn’t be able to return to the bar I found Niamh in.8 My life was to be the life of a schoolchild, only spanning daylight hours and as restrained as a child whose responsibility was to give into the well wishing but hostile commands of others.

As my mother opened the front door to my parents’ house I stood back. There was a quiet fresh breeze running through it, a stillness and poverty in the air that spoke of how its emptiness was receiving the shock of us disturbing it during a quietness when everyone should be at work.

Walking up the stairs, standing on the landing I heard my father speak up. “What’s happening?” he asked my mother. And I knew both of them forewent their day because they couldn’t care to leave me alone.

I stepped into my bedroom, curtains still drawn from the last night I slept there, with only a little gap to leave the sun casting a ray of light on my old school-day’s desk. Motes of dust floated amongst it and there was a coolness hanging that didn’t fully reflect the beam of light coming into the room. It was as though the chill was trying to soothe my red heat of shame, or was it anger, in the stillness of a preserved memory.

The room felt the same as when I was fourteen: I was a child again, protected and unable to protect myself. Unable to be myself. I began to accept I was not myself. And this brought some peace.

Index - Part 2