No Asylum

He believed in multiverses, in parallel dimensions.  He followed me around the ward chattering incessantly.  He showed me his arms.  Brown skin disfigured by raised pink welts.  Scars that would never heal.  He permitted me a glimpse into his traumatic history.  The scorn and the mockery and the humiliation and the racial abuse he had endured at the expensive, prestigious public school to which his parents had insisted upon sending him.  ‘I told them what they were doing to me,’ he said.  ‘They didn’t care. As long as I got good a-levels and made it to university it was all worth it.  They wanted me to be like them – nothing more than a colonial subject.’  He went to university.  He read engineering.  He emerged with a 2.1.  He had fulfilled his parents’ expectations.  And then he fell apart.  The racist insults he had been subjected to wormed their way into his head, took up residence there and refused to leave.  He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent the next decade as a revolving door patient in the local psychiatric hospital.  He tried to cut his skin away.  Bit by bit.

Later I found out that he had committed suicide in the worst, most painful way of committing suicide.

He called me once.  I was in the middle of one of my many frivolous pursuits.  I said I was busy and promised to call him back.

I never did call him back.

Tags: asylum, memories, mental illness, psychiatry, racism, regrets