20/05/09.

"I don't have a name," she says, the girl in the white jacket with the fashionable buckles all down the front.

The head clinician peers at her, with his severe glasses and dark grey eyes. 'Unresponsive to eye contact,' he scribbles down on his pad in his awful doctor's writing that's always so unreadable it's practically code, only decipherable by the other docs.

She wants to pick at the sores on her arms, but the jacket is too tight and warm, a long unwanted embrace from another person who thinks she is just a poor little girl who needs love to cure all the wounds and the rot in her mind, to stitch it all back up again.

What's the time? Where are you? What day is it? Look at me. What's your name? Are you seeing things? Are you afraid? Talk to me, say something, please respond, what are you feeling? What's the problem? Are you hearing things?

Look at me.

"My name is Doctor Elliot."

Her blonde hair is messy, un-brushed, unpresentable. The doctor gets bored and remembers to jot it down under "Appearance" on the check list. He wants her to open her mouth so he can look inside. He thinks maybe it might be drugs. She seems so damned thin, like she forgot about food all together. Some people get so trapped in their minds, they forget to look after their bodies. Her little stick thin frame is nothing to be proud of. She's accident thin, not super model thin, with dull skin and dark eyes. Just looking at her makes you think you should take a gun and just take her out to the yard, look away while I do this, it'll only hurt for a second. Just put her down, as if it would be the more humane option. This girl just makes you fucking uncomfortable. She stinks. Her breath catches inside the jacket coz it presses too hard on her scrawny ribs.

The doctor tries to get her to look at him again. "You'll be staying here for a while," he says, "would you like that? A nice rest? I think you need a nice rest. Don't you?"

She just shakes her for all the movement she has.

The doc motions for the nurse and she's wearing that cliché white little dress with the blunt heels. Doctor Elliot, looking shiny in his white coat with the silver pen sticking out of his pocket, tells the nurse where to take patient number 124.

They wheel her off in the chair. The nurses haul her up into a high bed, a cot with rails. They patronise her and tell her everything will be just fine. They strap her wrists to the bed with the leather cuffs. Again, everything is so cliché. The female nurse's name is Agnes.

She wakes up at 4 a.m., little patient 124.

She isn't cuffed any more, but she feels tired, cold, small. She draws her knees up to her chin. She searches for the needle mark where they pierced her skin. She doesn't really care though, she was aware that she'd end up here. That it was, inevitable, I guess.

Her name is Sophie. Sophie was a law student who ran every morning and took care of her elderly grandmother. Everyone was jealous of this chick Sophie, how pretty she was with her perfect blonde hair and her hazel green eyes. Let me tell you something about Sophie. Sophie was a bitch. She hated the other students and if they weren't morons they were competition. She pushed herself too hard because she was always thinking about money, about success. She saw herself getting up in front of the jury and making a speech that would steer them in the complete opposite direction. She never picked a team because she just wanted to win. She wanted to be a criminal lawyer, and whatever the obvious conclusion, when the other side had the evidence and the experts and the play appeared to be in their hands, she'd take it. She'd be eloquent and brilliant and persuasive. She'd win.

She hated the other students. If they weren't morons they were competition, but she never showed it. Sophie was popular at her uni. She got invited to all the awesome parties and she always looked hot and perfect. She had girlfriends that pretended to like her as a show of grudging respect. She pretty much had it all.

Then one day, she handed in a paper and she wasn't sure that it would get a distinction. It was just a little niggling doubt at first, not really too important. She went onto her other assignments but there it was again. When she put together her hypothetical case scenario and wrote her closing argument she twitched because it sounded so damn fake. It started to infect everything. She stuttered in her oral presentations, she became submissive in group work situations. She let male future lawyers do all the talking in class and pretty soon her mobile starting to go silent and she wasn't going to any parties any more. She knew she couldn't run that fast and she lied to people when she said she ran every day because she didn't. She lied to people when she said she knew what she wanted to. She was lying to herself every time she touched up her blonde roots. She studied all the time but her grades kept getting worse and worse.

She was staying up all night in the library and during these hours she started to see it all way too clearly. She wasn't that pretty, or that smart. She got in on a 'fringe' ENTER and her Uncle had paid the full fee. Her dead mother would be ashamed of the way she'd been acting, how she'd treated others. Her father must have run away to England because he couldn't stand the sight of her. She wasn't likeable, she wanted to be charming but she knew she wasn't. Her ribs stuck out but she started running harder and harder coz let's face it she was always solidly built. If she could just lose it she'd feel lighter, stronger, more energetic.

She worked harder and harder. "Sophie are you ok? Sophie what's going on?" drums beating inside her head as her fake friends inquired but she couldn't stop to talk she was planning five different assignments at once she was running and then she was stapling and photocopying and reading and writing and typing and reading and typing stapling and running and...

She got her grade back, her grade for the final year. And it was average. It was a credit, just below a Distinction. 74%. She shut the curtains. She knew that she was a failure. She'd been found out. She was never as good as she thought she was and now people were glad about her down fall. She looked terrible. The girl they all used to envy.

She was a stupid, average moron. She couldn't complete law school because she just didn't have the energy. She was still so fat, maybe if she lost more weight. She started to drink and take drugs to pass the time while others swam and went to parties on their holiday break. She took more and more drugs to kill the pain and she was so out of it she really didn't feel much, she just lay there.

When she awoke from her stupor she cried with all the agony piercing through the numbness and making her shake and scream and sob... On the floor, she was sobbing, gut wrenching hard sobs, the kind that make your chest ache.

Everyone had gone away by now. And Sophie was finally alone.

That annoying chick Lauren is poking her head in my door, asking me if I want to get a coffee with Georgia and Kate.

Then I really have to work on this assignment. I know I'll do well. I'll get a Distinction. It's the only thing that matters.

-XO, Soph.