seven and half minutes

there is a hospital across the street for young girls. it's a mental institution but parents pay a lot of money to have their little darlings housed there, more often than not to save them from the state penitentiary, or worse. Most of the girls are very sick, a few are just plain criminals. Psychotica, sociopaths, sadists, anoretics beyond hope. From my bedroom I can see the barred windows and the faint blue light that eminates from within. this is the first place where I've lived by myself, and the women and girls who live across the street, the blue light and the distant shouts I sometimes here at night, keep me grounded. They are not unlike roomates, except for that they keep to themselves.
I've noticed that at nine thirty exactly, the lights in the rooms begin to shut off for the night, starting at the very left of the building and moving steady as clockwork down the building, a silent cascade of blue institutional light becoming black. there are some times when a curtain might be pulled back, as if someone inside is trying to look out onto the street, but just as many other times the rooms are still.

It takes, from the first light out, to the last, seven and a half minutes. Exactly, to the very second. There is never a moment's deviation.

This came to my attention during certain evenings, when I would be standing over my bed with a number dresses laid out in front of me, deciding which to put out. I used to go out in the evenings, with a number of friends, play aimless games of shuffleboard at the quiet bar a few blocks away. I drank too much and too quickly, but so early in the night that I would be sober by midnight, and restless.

Each morning I would dress for work with the lights off, so early in the morning it was still solidly dark out, darker than it was when I went to bed a few hours before. I felt sick and dizzy, finding less and less things every morning to entice me out of bed, feet on the cold floor, sweater over my head.

It was only a few months ago that I felt differently about things. As if everything that had ever happened in the world had happened for the sole reason for preparing the universe for my arrival, and everything that would happen in the future was just for the sake of sustaining me. Everything was perfect, just as if should be. Life came easily to me then, things jumped into my open hand as soon as I pointed a finger, I knew the answer to the riddle before the joke had even been asked.

A few months into my new life in the new apartment, across from the hospital full of girls, I began making excuses to stay in at night. We all know the excuses that we make when we no longer want to go out at night, and I made every last one of them. And then I stopped making excuses, and gradually people stopped asking.

During this time I would make it a game to have dinner made, the kitchen cleaned, my work prepared for the next day, my clothes laid out, as much as I possible could do, before nine thirty. Then, at nine thirty, I would lie on my bed and watch as the lights began to snap out down the side of the building. Seven and a half minutes later, the building was dark.

one night my friend Shane came and visited and watched me do this ritual. Instead of asking the obvious questions to me, he asked, 'i wonder what you have to do to be put in a room at the left of the building? you're the first one to be in the dark each night.'

It's only seven and a half minutes, I told him, from the start of the building to the end. Seven and half minutes exactly. 'But that is only for one night,' he told me, studying the little dark windows. 'that is fifty two and a half minutes each week. that's probbably more than some of the girls get on their own during the entire day.

And after that, I had a new game. I lay in my bed at night and closed my eyes in thought. if I was a good girl at the institution, and I had taken my meds without hiding them beneath my tongue, and watched television without screaming at the set, and not sent the other girls lapsing into their episodes, and controlled my rage, would I be given a room at the right of the building? If I had used the dull scissors handed out each wednesday afternoon by the orderlies to cut out paper chains instead of using them against the soft skin of my inner arm, and if I had talked to my therapist instead of spitting, and chosen dressing on my salad instead of eating the transluscent shredded lettuce dry, and made my bed in the evening and folded my clothes in the evening, would I be given my seven and a half minutes of freedom, a privelage that no body else received, not even the girl in the room directly next to me?

Could I fall asleep in seven and a half minutes? Hold my breath and keep it held? How many pages of a book could I read, how many times could I write my name in cursive? If I touched myself, could i come, in seven and a half minutes? How many times? could I seduce someone, an old friend, my old boyfriend, his best friend, his brother, his father? If a stranger entered my bedroom at nine thirty, could he be naked and gasping for breath and begging me for one more, by nine thirty seven, halfway to nine thirty eight?

Because I've been good, and I've bitten my teeth down hard against my rage and I moved out of the apartment I shared with ben and into this new house without a sideways word to him about what he did.
Never letting him know that for nearly two years the tricks he put me through were enough to have him committed into the bleak house that stood across from mine? That the glittering secrets he thought he kept from me were never really secrets at all? But I, being too polite to bring it up, thought I'd let it go-

while we were living together, eating together, talking, fucking, kissing, crying, reading, walking, saying the names of objects outloud, filling up bottles with warm water, spitting into sinks, stacking plates, reading directions, turning thing off, begging. Him to me that I let him go, me to him that he give me a shred of something inside, and he told me there was nothing. that he was sick.

but he was lying. he had it, and he sent it away. for a long, long time.

and this is when i bring back the idea of lying next to someone, and having them being so deep inside of themselves that they do not see you. the inches between you becoming miles of empty roads, of city bridges hung with rotted metal and packed with strangers in cars who never want to know you.

and this is when I introduce the idea of lying on my back, happily accepting the blame for everything, and being so pleased with myself for keeping up the fight that I felt like the world was working like the making of a giant clock, and I alone was the one to hear its chiming.

and this is when I escape from the story, and it's no longer fiction, and i emerge from the story like someone raising their body out of the river where they have been drowning in. because I'm running out of time. If i could say it outloud, what I've been afraid to say now for so long. If I could say it I would. That I belonged in a madhouse during that time. that he convinced me I was crazy, such a subtle architect of well constructed lies and manipulations.

i know he lied about many things and that to the girl he left me for, months and months before we broke up, he was as open as a heart transplant patient to a surgeon, and while I put on my white gloves and scratched around in the dirt for a cure for a disease he somehow made me believe I was infected with, he kept me like a glass cage in an aquarium they kept together. Every time I see him I am reminded of that time, and I'm sick of being reminded. that the little wounded animal of our friendship is lying dead on the side of the road I want him to please, please get the hell out of my life.

And that I wrote this in seven and a half minutes.