The Waiting Room by Dia Wright (18, Illinois)

​I remember purgatory
psychiatric central
steaming painted car vents, driveway, crowded kids
Brother One, Brother Two, and me--
long and boring road to the Ben Gordon Center
with a pointless blue dog statue

and we never knew who Ben Gordon was--
coats of cotton, snow black and gray,
cloth-crunched vital signs, flowered ink pens sprouted names
paperwork on clipboards shuffled desks
twilight of waiting for our appointment
skinny legs like a swimmer’s, kicking the air of Mega Blocks
half-formed Lego houses crumbled. Whining. My brother stirred Legos.
No pictures were worth coloring with stubby crayons. I wanted Jolly Ranchers.
Mom said to be polite. Fringed lamps glowed. One doctor was on an IPad screen.
Names of medicine bottles, meaningless in my fourth-grader mind,
kept my brothers from murder when Mom and Dad
told us to be good kids, and left me to survive the shoving, with only my half-formed
stalactite grownup teeth to bite Joe in a rage. It was the year adults told me I grew, and
why? I looked like a starving bird. I wore a tiny T-shirt that said
Love Helps Me Grow, but I wasn’t four feet tall. I figured grownups said I was growing
to make it work, but only my razor-sharp ears were strong,
my pencil fumbling over worksheets, listening to Mom’s phone conversations
with her friend while I did English. I felt myself trapped in basements,
behind waiting-room doors I couldn’t open;
the world, a dollhouse I scampered inside. I was afraid, reading Daddy’s purple
Medical Encyclopedia, sure my parts were all broken and diseased,
that Pedia-sure and prayers could not help. I trailed Mom in the communion line,
and in a sacrament we took silently—what Mom called
food stamps that folks couldn’t know, unless they were dirt broke like us.
Icicle and snowdrift life melted into chocolate marshmallow eggs,
and Mommy hugged me over bedtime Little House books. I found a brochure
that read Mental Illness in Children and Adolescents,
which I read back from the Ben Gordon Center to the tune of Dan Fogelberg songs,
wondering what non-suicidal self-injury was, hall-calculations, schizo--
Springtime. Down the street there was an old lady whose husband, dying of cancer,
fed squirrels in the yard, and I brought her chocolates,
Christmas cards, and little presents. Joe and I visited her when Mom
took Dad to the psych ward. She gave me a snow globe, slightly chipped.
Pharrell Williams sang “Happy”—I listened to Joe’s music from the shower
my tiny soapy fingers, hair dripping in my eyes,
ceiling cracks whispered and sighed. He was out in the laundry room
by the computer monitor, and I persevered.
There was a waiting room in my heart, but nobody inside--
I silently cried names from the doorway, and under the desk,
“Help me, help me, I’m running out of love.”
Sometimes, I lived like a little ghost, and I felt just like a star, in a way
staring inside everyone’s night windows, wanting to go home.
All notes echoed back sadness
before their light-lost lyrics unfolded in my mind.