Everyone around him was dying. It seemed like he would only learn someone’s name before one of these tragedies happened. It was getting almost ridiculous to him now, how much death he had to see. It wasn’t like that when he first arrived; he had even made friends with his roommate, Matt. The doctors were shocked about the boys’ relationship. After all, his roommate Matt was a mute, and Jamie himself was one of the worst cases of social phobia the doctors had seen.

Jamie sneered as he thought back on the doctor telling his parents he was social phobic; he hated being called that. His parents had laughed, and asked what that meant. “What exactly does that mean doctor?” his father joked. “That my son is shy?” The comment was nearly justified, as it was all too common to slap the disease onto someone who was even the least bit shy. The doctors had to make their money after all. Still, Jamie had wanted to scream at his father for saying that, being shy was hardly the definition of what he had gone through.

Back when he was in school, he was almost always late for his classes – that is, the classes he even showed up to. He was barely keeping himself from failing, and he never spoke to anyone. His parents were furious with him. No son of theirs would be anything less than the dignified people they considered themselves to be. They wanted to change his behavior no matter what the cost. So they tried grounding him, then taking things away from him. They had even started throwing him out of the house. Of course, his mother always caved and let come back. These silly punishments went on until they received a letter of notification in the mail that requested they meet with a truancy officer so the proper punishment for his delinquency could be arranged. His parents were at a loss for what to do with him, at this rate they would be the ones put in jail for the way he was acting in school. So they did the only thing they thought was logical. They withdrew him from school.

Things hadn’t gotten any better after that. One day coming home after working a late shift, his mother had found him collapsed on the floor, overdosed on pain killers. She called an ambulance and his stomach was pumped, saving his life. When he was asked about it in the hospital he openly admitted that it was a botched suicide attempt. This little confession had earned him a week’s stay at St. Anne’s Hospital for the Mentally Insane before they released him as mentally stable. He was forced into therapy after this, but he wouldn’t talk to the therapist, not about any of the things he was really going through. His parents started to get weary that he was slowly getting worse so they forced more therapy‚ on him. Eventually they couldn’t deal with him anymore and sent him back to St. Anne’s.

Jamie wasn’t sure exactly what had been expected of him. Was he supposed to try and tell them all the things that they could never understand? To tell them of the things that he was so deeply ashamed of; that being around people scared him so much that he would shake and vomit before going somewhere. Having just a morning panic attack would have been a good day even, some days it would get so bad that he felt like he’d rather be dead than have to go into such an overwhelming situation (though overwhelming to him could be something as simple as going to school or a friend’s house). He had to fight this fear constantly, at school he would usually become nauseous or he would feel himself starting to slip into a panic attack, his body would start to shake and he just knew that everyone around him could see it in him. Everyone around him must have known he was crazy. It took every inch of his being not to give into those things, the shaking, the panic, the vomiting, and most importantly the fear.

He couldn’t even imagine having to eat in front of other people; he had gone off to the library when he was supposed to be eating lunch at school. Even when he was at home, his fears screamed in his head and drove him mad. When he went to sleep at night he had to have every door in the house, especially his bedroom door, locked and all of his curtains closed. Usually he could sneak food and eat it in his room but he would starve himself before eating in front of even his own family. If someone in his family was home with him he would lock himself in his room, because even they were terrifying to be around.

After a year of living like this, he began to learn small ways to cope. Alcohol often helped, but when his parents found out about they took all the alcohol out of the house. If they thought he was drinking they wouldn’t leave him alone. So he soon found it much easier to be sober, to be fearful, because that meant he could be left alone. The only solace he could find was in vicious addictions; he would eat too much food and sometimes vomit it back up. He would take enough prescription pain killers to get himself high. He would even cut himself just to feel pain, real pain.

His return to St. Anne was by nature, a displeasing one. He wasn’t merely being sent for rehabilitation, no, he was being cast away because nobody wanted to deal with him any longer. Originally he was given a private room in the men’s ward, but it wasn’t long before he was forced to live with a roommate. Jamie hated the idea, another person in his space, and demanded to leave the hospital. He was eighteen by that time; shouldn’t that have given him the right to leave when he choose? But the papers where already signed, he had practically signed his entire life over to that hospital. Even after he threatened to kill himself, they insisted his room be shared. There were too many patients, he didn’t have a choice.

Though he abhorred it, the change had become a huge blessing to Jamie. The boy he roomed with was a mute, and though he didn’t hold the same fear of people, there was a common understanding between the two. As their friendship grew, Jamie’s recovery started to grow as well. When he first entered the hospital they had considered him a lost cause, but with Matt’s support there was hope. Even Jamie himself had hope for getting better. On the Easter holiday Jamie was allowed to go home and visit his family, something he would brag about whenever he had the chance.

Matt however, had not been so lucky. His disease‚ as his mother had called it, was something he could never recover from. He lacked the ability to speak and there was nothing that could be done to change that. His mother refused to accept that her child could be such a defect‚ and sent him away and out of her life. When Jamie would talk about getting to go home, he would smile and try to show encouragement, but it secretly killed him. It was selfish but he didn’t want Jamie to get better. If he was better he would never return, and Matt would be alone again. When Jamie was gone, all Matt could think was how jealous he was, and how it terrified him that he could lose his only friend.

On the day Jamie returned to the hospital, he was excited. He couldn’t wait to tell his best friend all about his trip, as chaotic as it may have been. When he came to their room however he found Matt still asleep in his bed. It was still morning, a little past nine o’clock but it wasn’t like Matt to be asleep. So Jamie nudged him, and tried to rouse him from his sleep. Finally he called for the nurse to take Matt’s temperature and make sure he hadn’t gotten himself in trouble. It was possible he had been uncooperative and they gave him the tranquilizers.

The nurse had just checked in on Matt an hour before Jamie returned. Unfortunately, an hour can be all the time in the world in places like this. For Matt it had been an unbearable amount of time, bad enough for him to turn to suicide. It was a drug overdose; the nurse had tried to explain to a now sobbing Jamie. Many had probably been pretending to take his medication so he could trade it off to other patients for different drugs. Drugs that Matt knew his body couldn’t have handle in such a large amount. Jamie kept screaming at the nurse, telling her Matt would never do such a thing, but she wouldn’t listen. It was as clear as day, Matt’s death was no accident.

It devastated him, if he could have only come back a day sooner. Hell, if he could have come back only an hour sooner, his friend would still be alive. It wasn’t until it hit so close to home that he realized how common suicide really was in this place. He began to wonder whether or not the doctors were even interested in helping. It seemed they making money off of so many wasted lives was all the doctors cared about.

Suicide was becoming a constant thought in his mind. It wasn’t that he was considering it; he was too much of a coward for that. It was more because he saw so much of it but couldn’t understand it. What drove people to it? There was insanity, misery, and hopelessness throughout the whole damned place, but it seemed like the worst cases always lingered on. These people had given up so completely that even dieing seemed pointless. Suicide didn’t seem to be a product of complete emotional instability like Jamie always regarded it. The desire to take ones own life didn’t seem like a side-effect of disease, it seemed to be a disease in itself.

All the recovery that Jamie had made was completely obliterated on the day Matt died. To all those around him it seemed as though Jamie had just given up. The doctors had flagged him for suicide watch, which amused him. He could never take his own life, and he knew it. The doctors should have known better then to think that. In a sick kind of way Jamie began to enjoy his life in the asylum. To him it was like being dead without any physical death taking place.

After the accident he never saw his family again and he never left the privacy of his room. He even took meals in his room, the room that was left solely his out of the doctor’s reverence. Jamie was just alone now, alone with his thoughts and with endless time. The ever changing roster of patients and staff came to forget his name and began referring to him as patient four fifty-two. It didn’t matter to him, nothing mattered to him anymore. His life was restraining in simple ways but it made him feel free. He was in his own little way, in complete control. Complete control of everything and of nothing.