The room smells like my own sweat, my clothes are sticking to my body my hands are clammy and slippery. Everything looks normal and right, but I sense my own tension in the air. Something is palpably wrong. I can’t tell what. Carefully I run my gaze around the room. My bed is perfectly made as usual. The comforter on it is light pink and fluffy. I run my hand across it, my hand sinks into its plushy softness, and it tickles my fingers. At the top of my bed is my pillow, I made it myself there is teddy bear print on one side and light violet velour on the back. There are smudgy darker spots on the teddy bear side. I recognize the darker smudges as dampness from lying my “fresh from the shower” wet head on it one too many times. It doesn’t bother me. I stick my head into the pillow and inhale the slight mildew scent, which doesn’t bother me either. Instead the familiarity of the smell reassures me. My breath is coming in as fast pants. It’s the dream I had; it left me way too unsettled. Something happened in it, something bad. When I tried to gather the dream together and grab the pieces of it out of out of the murky darkness and into the light, all I came up with were wispy, unidentifiable fragments.

My teddy bears are right where I left them. My big brown bear with his soft fluffy body is tucked into bed, head on my pillow. Next to him is my brand new puppy dog stuffed animal. I inhale his scent. He still has that brand new, inside of the store smell. My fancy new bear still has that smell clinging to her too. She’s clothed in trendy jeans with lace trimmed back pockets and a little hole for her tail to stick out. Her shirt is green and sparkly with the word ‘cutie’ on it.

More of my many stuffed animals line the shelves. I run my hands along their soft, reassuring bodies. A lamp casts a bright glow over the wood table at my bedside. More stuffed animals sit near the lamp, my CD player lies there too. Its surface is smooth and cool; I run my hand over it. The cord connecting it too my head phones is rubbery and feels almost elastic when I run it through my fingers. The headphones are plastic and brittle. My books are all in a tilting pile on one shelf. They look like they’ll fall over if someone walks by too forcefully. The rest of that particular shelf is lined with old sketchbooks and journals. The memories those bring back flood over me like a tidal wave. I don’t know if I want to keep all those memories. The bottom shelf has more random knick-knacks on it, the ones I didn’t have any category for, so I had no where else to put. Yes it’s definitely me room, but there’s something wrong.

I look over the room again. One of my journals catches my eye. I try to scan my whole room, but my eyes are stuck on that one journal. It’s my latest one. I pick it up in my hand. The cover is black. The material is smooth, almost like smooth leather, but it’s only cheap imitation leather. There’s a thin strip of the fake leather material, this strip is a brick red color, and it too is smooth and gives a little when you touch it. There’s a metal clasp lying on top of the red strip, in the middle of the journal’s cover. As I touch it my panting breath quickens. My fingers clench in and turn into fists for a moment, I have to work hard to uncurl them, when I do I notice that my knuckles have turned white, my mouth is dry and tastes salty, my lips stick to my teeth and my lips are cracking. Slowly I open the journal looking around the room every two seconds. I’m feeling paranoid that someone will barge in on me, and I don’t even know why. I hold the open journal in my shaking hands and flip through it. My tiny handwriting stares back at me. The small letters that are crawling across the page are all different colors. Some pages are written in marker and some in pencil and some in pen. The pages are cream colored and the lines a stark black. Almost every single page is filled with writing. My innermost feelings, the feelings I wish I had so badly. My real thoughts, and the imaginary thoughts I wrote down just because the real ones were too difficult, scary, or painful to see on paper.

My eyes brush over most of the actual words written down on the page, but a single sentence catches my eye and connects with me as sharply as an electric shock.

“I just wish she would come over and hug me so badly.”

That day, a week and a half-ago came back to me immediately. It replayed itself in my head immediately with such strong feeling and detail that it felt like I’d traveled back there in a time machine.

I was in the hospital. Lying on a thin mattress. The pillow was made of plastic and crackled underneath me like Rice Krispies. The room was that pale lime color that’s supposed to be healing or something. There was a light knock on the already open door and a voice called my name. Recognizing that voice I quickly rolled over sat up. The world spun around me as I sat up. Everything was spinning so fast that it almost pinned me right back down on the cheap hospital issue mattress. I used all my willpower to keep my malnourished body conscious though.

“Aliza!” My face spread into a grin so large I was almost embarrassed of it, but it would not be held back.

“Hi Lacey,” She greeted me. “I’m so glad to see you.”

At that moment she stepped toward me, and I had to physically hold onto the starchy white sheet to keep myself from jumping up and running over to hug her. I didn’t know if that would be okay though. I did know though that at that moment the desire for a big hug from her was so strong that it was like a tornado whipping through my body. I wanted that reassuring physical contact more then anything else at that moment. I ached to feel her professional, reassuring arms around me. I needed that reassurance, that safety that I knew I would feel in her strong arms. I needed and desired it so much that I could taste it. She just stood there though. She smiled, beamed, back at me, but there was none of that physical contact that I was craving so badly.

Aliza handed me a little envelope. Thanking her, I looked down at it, studying it. It had my name on it and that was it. There was nothing else written on it, no stamp, no nothing. It wasn’t even sealed. Carefully I opened it up and pulled out the letter.

What did I do with that letter I wondered to myself? I stared around my room, this time I barely recognized anything in it. I felt so detached from the present, so stuck in that feeling of anxiety that it was overpowering everything. I looked down at the journal in my hands. Suddenly I remembered where I’d put that letter. I flipped through the journal until a piece of yellow notebook paper fluttered out and fell to the ground like a dying butterfly.

Kneeling down I picked up the paper. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted or should read the note again, but some invisible force was pulling me toward it. The impulse was too powerful to fight. I unfolded the paper.

“Dear Lacey,

I’m sorry we couldn’t tell you this in person, but Aliza thought it was best if we didn’t give you the news directly. We both realize the hurt that this news might bring and Aliza wanted to make sure that the hurt wasn’t reflected back on us. Because of your recent difficulties and this hospitalization she didn’t think it would be a good idea for you to join us in our summer trip to Greece. We will only be gone for two weeks instead of four, and Grammy and Grampy promised they’d visit you frequently while we’re gone. Aliza and both of us thought that you’d be safer back at the program where you’ll have as much help as you need if crisis hits. We love you very much though and are doing this because we just want to make the best choices for you. I’ll be visiting tomorrow or the next day. Dad might come too. We both miss you and hope you are feeling better.

Love Mom and Dad”

Tears welled up in back of my eyes. I was constantly crying in front of my therapist, Aliza, though and did want to show weakness by crying again. I bit down hard on my lip gritted my teeth hard to try and hold back the tears. The hurt was starting a black hole inside me that was swallowing up everything else inside me except frustration and anger. The anger began rampaging through my body trying to take over. I no longer had the urge to beg for a hug now the rage inside me was making me desire to kick Aliza. I sat back down on the bed. The tears had started falling now, making fun of my attempt to hold them back. They fell silently though; I held back the sobs. They fell in large droplets, dribbling down my cheeks until my face was soaked with liquid pain. My legs jiggled up and down back and forth.

At that point the thing I wanted to do nothing more was to kick Aliza, to attack her with both arms and legs. This scared me but I wanted to do it so badly that I became the urge. My body was on fire with the rage. The unfairness of my life was suddenly so obviously apparent it was as if all my previous painful, unfair, experiences had suddenly driven by in dump truck and it had all been unloaded on me. My legs twitched and hands quivered they wanted to attack Aliza so badly. It was like she represented everything wrong in the world. I was no longer a person. I was the monster of rage.

Everything was so intense I couldn’t take it any longer. Despite the fact that I was on a locked unit and couldn’t go anywhere, I ran. I ran past Aliza, through the door, past the staff doing checks in the hall, past the other kid’s rooms, past the nurse’s station, past the day area where a group was going on. I didn’t even notice the staff chasing me. I couldn’t feel Alizas’s worried gaze as she watched my frantic scurry. All I felt was the frightening rage inside me, and the need to somehow escape it. The locked door at the end of the hall stopped me. I fell against it hard, it didn’t budge. Backing up, I ran at it full force, my body slammed against it with a loud thwack. I rammed into it again and again of course nothing happened. My body was so live wired with emotion that I was numbed to the pain I should have felt. I barely noticed when staff’s hands first grabbed me. The hands pulled me away from the door. The hands half dragged half carried me down the hall towards the quiet room. I was almost half way down the hall when I my mind returned to my body. Suddenly I felt like I weighed two hundred pounds. Every emotion that had been numbed over by my rage came rushing at me. They hit me so hard I just went limp in staff’s hands.

Now in the present, as I stare at the letter I can feel the rage, the emotions and then the limpness. I stumble backward toward my bed and sit down on it, my breaths are slow and drawn out now, it’s almost an effort to breath. The notebook is still in my hands, the letters inside it. The book almost feels to heavy to hold now. The cover is now damp and sticky from the sweat of my hands. The writing looks like stains of the past screaming at me. I flip to the back page. Aliza’s beeper number is scrawled across in red ink. I repeat the number to myself a few times, and then I shut the journal and put it back on the shelf where it belongs. The tension in my room slowly dissolves as I back out of it and head down the stairs. I ask the program staff to use the phone to call Aliza. They smile. I haven’t talked to her since that day in the hospital two weeks ago.

“Hi,” I whisper shyly into the phone. “I was wondering, is everything still okay between us?”

When she reassures me that it is, I ask one more thing.

“Next time I see you, do you think, do you think I could have a hug?”

She says yes.