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happens. Dad comes home from work early. He silently examines the room, as if it were an art installation. Then he comes out, crying.
    “It’s just objects.”
    He wraps his arms around me.
    “How can we help you? What should we do?”
    I love him so much. But: “I don’t know.”
    It’s by now very hard to get words out at all. I’m in a trance. Someone with deep spiritual awareness might be in such a trance as I, who am so deeply lost. That night at a restaurant dinner, I hold my arm on the scalding hot radiator to try to feel my way back into my skin, call my body back to me (the burns I make are my Bat Signal in the sky). But I don’t come back to me. And I’m taken to the hospital the next morning.
    I don’t recall how we got to the Priory (again, like a drunk or a patient recovering from anesthesia, you remember thewhere but not the how). I clearly remember being admitted by a Chinese nurse who became affronted when I answered his questions in monotone.
    “Why she not want talk to me? Why she don’t like me?” he asked my mother.
    “Um, she just tried to kill herself.”
    He storms out in a huff and a new nurse comes to finish for him.
    Just sign here, they tell my mother.
    And she does.
    I have officially been committed, pending reevaluation.
    I haven’t been home to London in a long time, before being forced back, and my visitors are few and far between. And random. The closest friends can’t face it. The acquaintances I’ve held at a distance see it, maybe, as a way to get to know me, although there is currently no “me” to know.
    Matthew—“Handsome Matthew,” a boy I knew when I lived in Brighton—brings me a McDonald’s belt he found in the trash, and a copy of
Against Nature
by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Andrew—I don’t recall his last name, but I know we went on a date once and I stole a T-shirt from his skateboard store and he drank Goldschläger in St. James’s Park—brings me a Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band sweatshirt from a charity shop. Even though I can’t remember his last name, I still wear the sweater all the time. There is a hole over the “E,” which is over my heart. He knows (I must have told him on our one date) how much I love Bruce Springsteen. I admire the lad for pursuing his crush to a mental ward.
    I play “Human Touch” by Bruce and his wife, Patti, on my Walkman at night: the line about a little touch-up and a little paint takes me to a time when, after school, as a very little girl, I would ritually lock myself in the bathroom and cover my face in makeup, starting expertly—sharp eyeliner, dainty lips—before devolving soon enough into evil clown face. I’d take a good look at the terrible face. Then I would wash it all off and go downstairs for dinner. I can see the line from there to cutting. Before the cutting but after the face paint, when I would learn a bad word, I would write it on my thighs or stomach and wear it to assembly under my school clothes. “Fuck.” “Cunt.” “Whore.” School assembly was frightening because I was so sure I would stand up and shout the words I had on my skin.
    There are much crazier people than me in the Priory. The dog-woman, who stares. I always thought Joan Crawford was a great movie star because she made staring her hallmark, her “thing.” This old lady is more like Eddie, the dog from
Frasier
. She just stares at people as they come into her sightline. It’s all she does.
    There’s a very sexy teenage girl who, to stop cutting herself, plucks each and every hair off her legs and then wordlessly, without realizing, leans over and plucks my eyebrows. My cats do this, diligently licking themselves until they are accidentally licking each other.
    On my third or fourth day there, they bring in a homeless boy who has, like many patients, been picked up from the streets. He has a swastika carved into his forehead because voices told him to do it. I am extremely scared of him, so I force myself to make