There are padlocks on the windows, she says as she sends me a picture of sunset from her bed. The sky is a fiery purple, clouds straining in all directions and twinkling lights from the buildings outside. But there is no beauty in a sunset seen from an inpatient room in the emergency psychiatric ward. There is no rest in the sleep to be had there. How many years we have spent contemplating the looming clouds around us. I run to the ends of the earth to escape them. She is glued to the ground, like in that bad dream where you try to move but cannot, and they engulf her. She reminds me of Sylvia Plath. If only the image didn't end with her head in the oven. The allure of madness lies in abandoning what little hope there was.
My mother smiled. "I knew my baby wasn't like that."
I looked at her. "Like what?"
"Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital."
She paused.
"I knew you'd decide to be all right again."
I long for winter now, for the darkness to descend. I long for the chill to bring the happy people indoors, and leave me alone with my City Streets in the Hudson River winds. That giant trap of sunshine and foliage frivolity, of well-paying jobs and only time left over to spend the paycheck at swank bars because it's the thing to do, it beckons at my every step. I no longer know why I try to avoid it. Perhaps I don't, either.
"I'm writing a novel, I said. I haven't got time to change out of this and into that."
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