Admittedly Committred

Admittedly Committed

All I could do was stand there and shiver. I don’t know if it was the fact that all I was wearing was a hospital gown and a pair of socks or if it was the fact that I was in a mental hospital. I was standing there, waiting to be put in a room for the night and I would be reassigned in the morning.

Laying down on what felt like a stone with linens thrown on it wasn’t very comfortable at all. Sleep was the least of my worries at this point though; I was wondering how to stay warm. Looking around in the dark at my room, everything was bolted directly to the floor. The beds, dressers, and desks were made of cheap oak and the walls were cement covered in an inch and a half of squishy white padding. Inside this room with me lay two brothers, who I came to find out have been in this place for a very long time and weren’t leaving anytime soon. I didn’t want to be there.

When I awoke, the two brothers were playing some sort of fake soldier game and running around the room like animals and hitting each other with pillows. They couldn’t have been older than thirteen. It was very sad that people so young should ever need to be put in a place such as this. I introduced myself to them. One of the brothers, Beau, got on my nerves right from the start. He was a very annoying little boy. He spent most of his days in a corner in “time-out” because he was the one kid out of all of us who never listened and never stopped talking.

Sitting down in the discussion room after breakfast was very uncomfortable for me. I was the new kid and I didn’t like being looked at by these people. We were all in here for something, but none of us talked about it unless we were forced by the counselors in the room. These people were crazy. Running away seemed pea-sized in comparison to the other things these kids had done in here. There were kids with white stretchy bandages on their arms to cover up the cuts. Other kids just had like severe ADHD and were on high doses of Ritalin. There was this little boy named Tyler, he was the smallest, youngest boy there.