"You know, that's how girls do it." A gruff voice cuts through the fog of drowsiness that lays over you like wet cotton. You stir in your bed, struggling to open your eyes. When you do, you find yourself in a room that is utterly foreign to you. The walls are painted in a chipping, off-white color, with oddly outdated paintings and pictures hung in mismatching frames to add a 'homey' feeling to the place. It is otherwise ascetic. You sit up in the strange bed. The stiff, white sheets are rough against your skin. You realize then that you're wearing a hospital gown - or something like it. It feels flimsy and immediately you pull the thin blankets back up around yourself. Tubes trail from your hands.
"Did you hear me? I said that's how girls do it. And they never mean it." You look over your shoulder. There is another bed about five feet away from yours. A man with a pockmarked face peers at you from beneath a bush of prickly brown hair. He frowns and shakes his head at you. Your stomach aches and your throat burns. The man's condescending tone turns into something more akin to advising. "Son, if you really want to kill yourself, use a fucking gun."
You blink tiredly at the man, but say nothing. You want to get out of your bed and throttle him, but you don't. Instead, you lean against the metal headboard of your bed and look up at the ceiling. Sadness settles on your shoulders again. You know why you're here. You knew when you woke up yesterday that you had failed. They had slapped your face roughly and shoved more tubes in your nose and mouth than you knew what to do with. It had been thoroughly uncomfortable. Then, you had been forced to eat charcoal. That was even worse. You pull your knees to your chest.
It was hard to know how many pills to take. You had done some research, but not much. After all, this wasn't the first time you had felt suicidal, as your therapist would say. ("Have you been having any thoughts about suicide, Lin?" What a thing to ask.) Though it was much more common now than ever before. You knew you were worthless. You knew that nothing good would happen in your life again. And you knew that was your fault. You took up space for no reason. You hated yourself for that, among other things. And after sitting at your table in your kitchen yesterday, staring at the cylindrical bottle of generic painkillers, a full glass of water to the right of it, you had just decided to do it. Fuck it. You didn't think about it. You couldn't. If you remember correctly, you had been crying the whole time, burning tears pouring out of your eyes as a vast loneliness stretched around you for miles.
But then you had panicked. You had taken the pills, you began to feel drowsy, and then you decided that this was a bad idea. This was stupid. This was pathetic. You were pathetic. If you died, you'd be dead forever. There was nothing after this. Your fingers fumbled on the touchscreen as you called 911. And now here you are, a day later, groggy in a hospital room with some weirdo. This whole thing is probably going to cost more money than you even have in your bank account. You fight the well of tears rising in your throat, never far beneath the surface, and loll your head to the side to look at your roommate. Your face is emotionless. "I'll try to remember that for next time," you rasp at the man.