Unannotated

The window is open, just enough.
A sliver of breeze stirs the curtain—thin cotton, yellowed at the hem, lifting like a breath held too long. Outside, the sky is the color of wet newspaper, heavy with the promise of no rain. Just heat. The kind that presses down, that turns brick to sponge, that makes the air taste like iron filings and distant sirens.

I sit on the folded hospital blanket, spine against the wall, pencil in hand. Not the stub my fingers once wore down to nubs in the night. Not the one that snapped under pressure when I tried to write the word *Mira* one too many times. This one is long. Whole. Unbroken. Julian gave it to me yesterday, slipped into my palm like contraband. No words. Just that slow blink of his, like he was settling dust.

I write slowly.

Not a poem to summon. Not a poem to escape.
This one is different.

I don’t need it to be true.
I just need it to be mine.

The city breathes beyond the fence. I can see it—gray towers leaning into each other, fire escapes tangled like old ivy, billboards stuttering through static, their ads half-gone, faces peeled away by wind. A taxi idles at the corner, its roof light blinking on and off, on and off, like a dying pulse.

But I also see the fence.

The real one. Chain-link, rusted at the base, crowned with coiled wire that gleams dull in the evening light. It circles the yard—*our* yard—where the patients shuffle in crooked lines, heads down, hands in pockets, as if carrying secrets too fragile to hold openly.

And yet.

And *yet*.

The city is there too. It doesn’t vanish. It doesn’t have to.

I let them both exist.

The woman in the window across the street—she’s drinking wine from a paper cup, one leg propped on the sill. Her hair is wild, copper in the light. She looks like Mira. *Is* Mira. She raises the cup toward me, and for a second, I see the bookstore behind her, the shelves crammed with spines cracked by sun, the smell of clove and ink and lemon oil rising through the page.

But then she’s gone.

Just the empty window.

And I don’t flinch.

I write: *She was never mine. But she was real in the way that matters.*

The words don’t burn. They don’t twist in the air, trying to force themselves into being. They sit quietly on the page, simple and unadorned. Like stones. Like footprints.

A memory comes—not forced, not dug up in therapy with Voss’s cold questions and his clipboard like a shield. It just arrives.

My mother, before the fire, reading to me on the couch. Her voice low, warm, a little slurred from wine. *The world is made of stories, not atoms,* she said. I thought she was joking. I was ten. I didn’t know she meant it literally.

I write that down too.

The pencil glides. I don’t cross out. I don’t revise. There’s no red ink beside me, no margin filled with Voss’s tight, clinical script—*delusional narrative construction*, *evidence of dissociative confabulation*, *needs increased dosage*.

The red ink is gone.

Not erased. Not hidden.

*Gone.*

Like it never was.

I used to hate it. Used to fight it, tear pages, scream at him that he had no right, that my words were *alive*, that he was killing them with his theories and his pens. I believed he was the villain—the keeper of the white rooms, the man who locked up dreams and called it medicine.

But now I know.

He wasn’t the one who kept me here.

I did.

Not by madness.

By love.

By the need to make something beautiful from the ash.

I look down at the page. The poem is taking shape. It doesn’t have a title. It doesn’t need one.

It begins with the fence.
It ends with the sky.
And in between—

—a woman walks down Avenue B, laughing.
—a boy kicks a can down a wet sidewalk, his shadow stretching into three.
—the radio plays Donna Summer, then cuts to static, then plays my mother’s voice, singing a lullaby I haven’t heard in twenty years.
—a pair of hands, small and soot-stained, reaching for mine in the dark.

I don’t deny any of it.

I don’t claim it, either.

I let it *be*.

My knee aches. The scar tissue pulls when I shift, a dull reminder of the night I ran—*really* ran—through broken glass and sirens, believing the city would save me if I just wrote myself into its rhythm.

It didn’t.

But it didn’t betray me.

It was never real.
And it was never *not* real.

The light is fading. The ward will call us in soon. I can hear the click of shoes down the hall—Nurse Lowry, predictable as a metronome, her steps slow but insistent. Dinner. Meds. Bed.

But for now, I’m here.
Just here.

The pencil rests in my hand. Not a wand. Not a weapon.
Just wood and graphite.

I watch the sky deepen. The first star appears—faint, smudged by light pollution. I don’t name it. I don’t write a metaphor.

I just see it.

And in seeing, I am whole.

The poem is finished.

No grand ending. No revelation screamed into the void. Just this:

*Let the city burn.
Let the hospital stand.
Let me write in the space between,
where no one has to choose.*

I close the notebook.

No one will annotate it.
No one will file it under “delusional output.”
No one will read it and pity me.

Maybe no one will read it at all.

And that’s the freedom.

I press the spine to my chest. Just once. A heartbeat against paper.

Then I place it on the windowsill, where the air is cool and the light still lingers.

Let it stay.
Let it fade.
Let it mean what it needs to.

I lean back.
Close my eyes.
Breathe.

And for the first time in years—

—I am not trying to save myself.

I am simply here.

Watching the world.

Both of them.