I left the psych ward that summer not feeling any better but with a new prescription. The prescription gave me headaches, so I got another prescription that even though I still didn't want to die, made me want to shoot myself.

The following months went by in a gray fog. I did schoolwork from my darkened bedroom. I'd scream in the corner, needing to find a new object to calm down with every time. Sometimes, as I was searching, my mother watched from the doorway.

"I'm worried about her," I heard her say over the phone to my father one night. "What are we going to do with her?"

What were they going to do with me? The world is made for the mentally healthy. There's no place for the sick ones. The thought of my life, long and lonely and without any successes, seemed to drag out in front of me. Already, people were talking about me the same way they talked about Davy's brother - lost to the void. A short life ended by a sickness no one ever attempted to understand.

The only time I left the house as the summer dragged on and the fall started was when I went to see Constantine. I really, really loved that woman. She was the only person who looked at me without any expression other than pity or fear. She was the break in the fog. For a while, we were normal. But then one day, one of my worst days, I found myself in Constantine's kitchen, holding a knife in my hands. It was cool and tarnished silver. I wasn't doing anything, just holding it while Constantine checked the temperature of the cake. There was a clattering noise, and her ashy fingers knocked the knife out of my hands. I watched in rapt fascination as her hand swung to meet my face, whipping my head to the side. A burst of pain flooded my mouth and I tasted blood.

The house was silent and I saw the instant regret in Constatine's eyes. I brought a hand to my lip and my fingers came away bloody. Constantine tried to reach out to me, but I broke away from her reach and ran out of the house. She tried following me, hitting her leg on the table, and she called out, her voice agonized and desperate. "Babygirl, I'm so sorry! Mama's sorry! Please come back!" I kept running and didn't stop until I was in my mother's arms. I screamed into her lap the rest of the night, hearing Constantine's words over and over again in my head.

My mother smoothed my hair and sat silently. She didn't ask how I'd gotten the bloody lip. She probably thought I had done it to myself.

In the weeks after, I dove into poetry with a vengeance. The school advisor had looked at me like I was an idiot when I said I wanted to be a poet and told me journalism was a dying field, but the thought of being a poet gave me something to strive for. I wanted to see Constantine badly, but every time I tried to urge my feet down the deer trail, I froze, phantom pain throbbing in my lip.