Refeeding​
by Cindy Zhao

Runestone, volume 12

Refeeding​
by Cindy Zhao

Runestone, volume 12

My first day on the ward, I was parked facing the empty mouth of the hallway. From its yellow throat leaked fluorescent overhead lights, waxen tile, a string of bulbs smeared across the window opposite. Shards of voices punctured the silence like teeth. Sporadically, IV poles rattled past, their afterthoughts the sunken girls trailing behind. We were pieces of unchewed flesh caught between the molars of these walls. 

I huddled at the flattened head of the stretcher, watching the spotless canvas of snow outside. I was no longer cold  — I was sticky, porous, burning for the first time since June, the month I decided to starve. The room smelled of sharp isopropyl and hospital linens, faintly bitter. Had I been on the other side of the glass, I might’ve lain down under the storm-gray sky, the morning’s low fog a white eyelid. Under the vapour’s eave I would sleep in coldness; deaf, numb, pale as bone.

The first plaintive whine of the pump was a pierced dream, a pinch from stupor. Thick feed began to snake through the tube, small stripes of trapped air riding downward. In the sweat, the weight, the Christmas colours, the chocolate Ensure, I tasted the fever of waking — sweetness, thick and sinister.

I would leave for the snow, but, misunderstanding the constitution of my body, they had placed bedrest in bold on my chart.

I saw only later what they had seen: the knobs of my spine, thighs the circumference of plastic bottles, numbers that ticked the boxes under the word “involuntary”. 

In a language foreign to tests and diagnoses was the wound I was trying to freeze. I found anaesthesia in the retreat into suspension. Upon admission, they waved only the bloodwork in alarm — the sum of the sufficient evidence. 

No one asked me why.

I know I was severely physically ill; I know this admission saved my life. But nowhere was there an essential “madness”.

Instead, at the bolted ward door, I see a threshold of acceptable pain. One whose suffering transgresses these frames through self-destruction exceeds the limits of intelligibility. What we do not understand, we label “illness”. We medicate and incarcerate it correspondingly — we, the sane.

This is why those of us at 4 Northwest fight the return to life. We chase the complete erasure, we build homes in the paradoxical comfort of numbness. Some days we are “compliant” and some days we are mad. This is natural — we are also human, we carry the incomprehensible will to live in spite of our wounding.

I had no words for this yet — only condensation on glass, the sight of snow. The groaning door and the nurse flipping the switch with her knuckle, the tray in her hand my first proper meal since summer.

My new room seemed to gain solidity, sudden brightness tracing its knife’s edges: rusted whiteboard frame, cobwebbed slats of the radiator, threshold in which she stood, wordless. 

Blinking, I rubbed my eyes to the sting of the light.