I�ve always had a love for watching things come full circle. At that time in my life everything felt like it was coming undone. Nothing moved in smooth feminine lines. Everything had become arrows, masculine and foreboding pointing out disaster. Hope had broken off and faded away out of my life. Happiness said it was going for a pack of smokes and never returned, leaving only skid marks in the drive (on it�s departure) to let me know that it had ever been there. On my fourteenth birthday I decided to take things into my own hands. I was betting my life, but at the time it wasn�t anything much worth fretting about losing. I was going to die on the day I was born. Behind me I would leave a nice neat little box of a life.

I skipped school. I sat at home and watched Days of Our Lives. I drank Cherry Coke and ate a large mixing bowl of painkillers and tranquillizers. I remember the beginning of the first seizure. My muscles clenched tight, and I felt a vague sense of relief.

I came to in a panic. My head was being held at an angle. Plastic tubes were being shoved down my nose and into my stomach. The urge to pull the tubes out was over whelming. I was paralyzed. I wanted to scream, but no sound came out. The sound stayed stuck in my throat. It wove its fingers around the tubing. It gathered itself into a bubble. Finally it burst, and I faded away into the absolution of coma.

My eyes opened slowly. Everything was monochromatic. My first thought was that I had melted butter stuck in my eyes. Gradually the edges of the room came into focus, then the furniture. The room was almost bare. There was one large window. Through it, muted light seeped in. I would learn later that it did not contain glass, but heavily scratched hard plastic. It filtered the light and added to the sickening effect of the color scheme. The blanket, the sheets, the walls, the metal frame of the bed, even the cracked linoleum flooring was yellow. Not just yellow, but butter and piss yellow, and orgy of jaundice. I assumed that some visually challenged person thought that being in an all yellow room would be cheerful but they were dreadfully of the mark. I felt lost. I knew it wasn�t heaven because I could smell chlorine and Lysol. I wasn�t sure that it wasn�t hell, and I�m still not.

In the months to come I would grow accustomed to the place. I moved as if I was a trolley on invisible tracks. I slid noiselessly from one group to another. First, art therapy where I made an ashtray even though no one was allowed to smoke. Since the ashtray was heavy and breakable I wasn�t allowed to keep it. I sent it home. I floated from art therapy to group after group therapy. I listened to everyone cry about their life. More often than not I was dismissed for laughing out loud. It seemed so comical. My entire stay was permeated with the feeling that the whole palace, and most of my life was an elaborate joke. At first the gags were obvious, pineapples hitting people in the head, patients doped so high on medication that all they could do was rock and drool attempting to play Jenga, the all wino wall color scheme, and the fact that I took enough medication to kill an elephant, but was still alive. As the days wore on the mind numbing routine and medication caused my sense of humor to dwindle.

One day it was over. I was free to leave. I was allowed to return home to my demons. Professional lunatics had deemed me sane. I stood drinking it all in under a buttery yellow sun.

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