Emergency Room

You’re twisting your hands in your lap, trying to breathe normally as you take in the blank, beige walls, the blank, beige furniture, the blank, beige floor. The cameras in all four corners. The bullet-proof metal door. This room that seems better suited to an interrogation than to healing—an observation which, when voiced, gets you a reassurance from the school nurse sitting across from you.

“They just want to make sure you’re safe.”

You nod. “I know.”

And then in bustles the interrogator herself, wheeling a computer on a stand. She greets you both and plops down next to the nurse, pushing back her long, gray hair, and assures you that this won’t take long. She has a template. You smile and nod, and give her your name and date of birth when she asks.

“So, what’s your story? Why are you here?”

You answer, as briefly as you can. You explain how much of yourself you’ve been giving away, and how, and how much of it is blood. She is brisk, brusque, sympathetic. It’s all right. She reminds you that you’re still young and you don’t know everything. You nod. You know. She reminds you that sometimes people are just looking for attention. You know. She reminds you of the limitations of the internet as a means of forming and maintaining relationships. You know, you know, you know. And then she says it.

“Someone as fragile as you are should be careful.”

Fragile.

You’re on your feet, ready to shove the word back into her mouth and down her throat to die there. “How fucking dare you? ‘Fragile’? I’m not some sad girl with bruised eyes and olive-branch wrists come here for your protection. You don’t know me. Put that down on your template. Make a space for it. I may be in pain, but I have shoulders Atlas would envy. I have hands that can push hearts back into ribcages and remind them that they’re beating. This body holds as many microcosms as yours does, and it’s been bleeding like this for six years, and I am still here. When I was a child and I cried to see other people suffer, they called me ‘fragile,’ but even then, my heart was an ocean and there were stories in my veins. I was born loving. I was born limitless. And nothing, not even I, can take that away from me. I will be scared, in pain, fighting, falling, trapped, and even lost, but don’t you dare deny my strength. Don’t you ever.”

You nod and look down at your lap, feeling your face twist itself into the familiar rueful little grimace that comes with disagreeing and being afraid to say so. “I know.”