This is Where

This is where I came every day, 715 West 12th Avenue, a psychiatric hospital, a building on the verge of being condemned.

Snapping mouse traps lined the corridors. Thick layers of dust muted the red-and-teal carpet. White clocks hung haphazardly, each telling a different time. Tinted blue double-pane doors swung open at intervals, releasing a burnt electrical smell and the occasional scream.

For a building full of the dangerously paranoid, it felt like a sadist’s sick joke. This is where we admitted you.

This is your room—or it was, until they moved you. You had shared it with three other women. You told them terrible stories of how you would all die there, because you believed it. Soon, you had your own room. If I didn’t know you were sick, I might have called it clever.

This was the rec room. A room at the end of the hall, where they kept the TV on all the time, and laid out adult colouring books, word searches and sudoku on the table. You were always afraid of this room. On our walks back and forth from one end of the hall to the other, you’d pause to peer inside, curious but fearful. This is also where I found a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Slipping it into my bag, I vowed to read it cover to cover once this was all over. I have not read it. This was the power of later.

This was your new room. It had a window, and although it was mostly frosted, light still came through, illuminating speckles of dust, dancing in the air. We sat in silence, watching bars of blue turn to syrupy yellow as the sun set. Once, I played your favourite song on my phone, wondering if you’d recognize it, but the melody had turned sour in your ear, the notes colliding and bottlenecking in the conveyor belt of your mind.

This is when they secured your wrists and ankles to the bed. To keep you from escaping, again. In order to get to the electro - convulsive therapy unit you needed to go through a series of underground tunnels beneath the hospital. The tunnels were dank, lit only by flickering amber lights. Condensation dripped from the ceilings. This is where the nurse told me they filmed early episodes of The Walking Dead. I believed her. You were already convinced this whole thing was a sham, a conspiracy to steal your soul. That I was not me, but an imposter who looked like me, body-snatched by the evil puppeteers pulling the strings. The tunnels were further proof.

The Purple Room, this is where they had your weekly assessments. Dr. Thomas, the head psychologist wore a sky blue shirt with a palm tree pattern and surfer dudes giving the hang-ten symbol. It was their policy that all doctors and nurses wear Hawaiian shirts to make the patients feel more at ease. But it only made you distrust them more. “This is definitely a fake hospital” you remarked. “What respectable doctor would wear a ridiculous shirt like that?” I had to agree with you there. You said it in Chinese, because this was where English left you. The language you’d spoken for forty-five years was suddenly and utterly gone. I did my best to translate.

The accessibility bathroom. This is where I bathed you, washed your hair, brushed your teeth. This is where, folding your hospital gown into a careful square, I saw how small you had become.

August 27, eleven days after your discharge. This is when the city boarded up the building. Eight months later, it was rubble. This is where a green lawn now stretches, overlooking a small parking lot. Four benches sit among a modest row of miniature firs, where people eat lunch or scroll on their phones. This is where no one would have known there existed a building there at all.