Josh

Visiting rights. I’ve been here over a year and they’ve finally granted me visiting rights. Merry Christmas, Josh. Season’s bloody greetings.

We’ve come to some sort of equilibrium. I don’t act mad. They don’t think I’m quite so mad. But since I refuse to backtrack on my story and they refuse to believe that it’s true, it’s always going to be an uneasy truce.

I’d like to see my parents and Kyle. They want me to see a psychiatrist, a care worker and a priest. Presumably to receive my gold, frankincense and myrrh. A psychiatrist to continue probing my mental well-being, to ascertain whether I’m making stuff up. To clamber into my dim, dark recesses and hope to emerge unscathed. A care worker to follow up on the psychiatrist’s report and assess whether I’m a danger to myself or to others. A priest to tick another box. So I’ll see their troupe and then I’ll get to see mine.

And in the meantime, I’ll continue trying to make sense of it all in my own head. Because believe me, none of this makes any more sense to me than it does to them. Except I know who I am. I just don’t know what happened to the date. It feels like I’ve spent time on a film set surrounded by actors speaking lines about some time in the future and when I finally get out of here it’s going to be the mid-eighties and everyone’s going to laugh and point and say got you there, Josh, had you going, two thousand and nine, two thousand and ten, ha ha ha. Big joke.

It doesn’t feel like over a year. I’ve lost weeks, months. I went through a period where I was kept sedated. A soporific case study. Then I’d sleep for long periods and they’d hook me up to some piece of equipment that monitored my dreaming thoughts. And in my dreams, I was always back in the forest, back in the glade. With Kyle. Back in the day. And then I’d be falling, falling, down into the darkness, down into Alice’s rabbit hole. And when I woke, I’d be here and the only thing that would change would be the seasons I’d see out of the window, summer rusting into autumn, decaying into winter.

I don’t get to mix with the other patients. I say patients. Inmates? I’m not sure if that’s a blessing or a curse. I hear them, sometimes, some of them. Shouting, arguing. Instead the only other people I’ve seen have been the staff. Probably about half a dozen in total. There’s two of them I really like, whose visits I look forward to. One of them’s a nice guy, around forty, I guess. He talks to me about his wife and kids. Plays cards with me, blackjack mainly, plus he’s teaching me poker, five card stud. He tells me about the poker nights he has with his buddies, how they play for small amounts of money. It’s nice to hear about something normal. The other’s a junior doctor, a girl in her late twenties. She’s got the most amazing blue eyes and short cropped blonde hair. A cute little nose stud. I like her a lot. She talks to me about music. Except I’ve never heard of any of the bands she tells me about. She finds it amusing that I’ve genuinely never heard of Kings of Leon or Bloc Party or the Killers. I told her I like Talking Heads, the Cocteau Twins. She said she thinks she’s heard of them, that she’s read about them. Like they’re ancient Egyptians, or something. I think she’s beginning to believe me. She won’t admit it to herself, though. Flies in the face of her professional opinion, and all that. She says I’m like Artemis Fowl if he were written by HG Wells. I say Artemis who? She laughs.