Patient name: Izuna Uchiha

Date of birth: 13/09/1985

Journal entry: 23/11/2022

Currently: Slept through night according to nurses despite incidence described below. Mellow in the morning. Initiates breakfast within 15 minutes after sorting foods. Finishes breakfast in 32 minutes. Initiates lunch within 20 minutes. Finishes lunch in 46 minutes.  Initiates dinner within 15 minutes. Finishes dinner in 52 minutes. Rash on forehead healing after banging it against wall last night. Patient does not want to show rashes from self-harm on arm but denies any redness, heat or liquid. Nurse suspects new rash on leg bases on blood on trousers, patient does not want to talk about it when asked, unclear whether patient has managed to get hold of sharp object but nothing found in his bathroom. Patient does not allow himself to be searched. Decision not to force search at the moment.

Yesterday night agitation in the form of head-banging, unclear reason. Upset when new patient arrives escorted by police and guards. The patient denied need of extra dose Alimemazine to calm down. The new patient seems to cause current patient enormous distress despite no interaction between the two.

Psychological examination: Lacking formal and emotional contact, lack of facial expression, latency to response, respects turn-taking in conversation, no eye contact, does not smile in appropriate places. Self-harm in the form of banging his head against the wall, probably also cutting in leg. Last time cutting in arm last week as patient got hold of scissors another patient had smuggled in. No suicidal communications

Planning: Patient will be required to initiate meals within 10 minutes and finish meals within 30 minutes starting from tomorrow. Patient informed by nurses. 

Nobody was allowed to knit in here.

I always found that particular part comprehensively funny. Like the fact that you weren't allowed to bring tweezers with you in your hand luggage on a plane. Of course you could use tweezers for dangerous purposes on planes, just like you could with knitting needles in a psychiatric ward. But why forbid tweezers when you were allowed to bring bottles of tax free, that could cause far greater damage if you threw them? Why forbid knitting needles when you were allowed to bring T-shirts, that could cause far greater damage if you used them to hang yourself?

That was incredibly insensitive of me. Luckily, I didn't say that out loud. Years of studying people around me, normal people, had given me a hum of what thoughts were fine to say out loud, and what thoughts should remain in your brain forever. Still, I didn't like the thought I'd had about hanging yourself with a T-shirt. Suddenly, it was crystal clear to me why knitting needles weren't allowed because I would do anything to have some.

I needed a different method. I closed my eyes, tried to think, but immediately opened them again; closing my eyes always made me even more hyper-aware of everything around me than I usually was, especially my own skin. The feeling of the hem of my trousers on my waist, even if the trousers were baggy and I didn't wear underwear to minimise the sensation. The seam of my sock, that was one millimetre askew. The way my long, black hair was collected slightly tighter on the left side compared to the right into my high ponytail.

Why had I thought that way about hanging yourself?

I pulled my head lightly along the wall where I had sat solving a Rubik's cube which had not been deemed to be angular enough to cause anyone any harm, and thus was allowed in the ward. The sensations the wall provided were familiar; the feeling of the tapestry on my scalp, the sound of the friction between my hairs as I pulled my head along it, the smell of old glue.

I breathed out.

And begn. Carefully initially. Then more and more vigorously.

"It's Izuna", I heard someone say. "He's banging his head again."

They said it as someone would say "It's Izuna. He's eating an apple again". Disappointment, irritation, fatigue; their feelings. And guilt; my feeling. It bothered me, somehow. Through the fog in my brain, it bothered me. I knew they'd seen thousands like me before. But how could this ever become normal enough for anyone to use such a monotonous voice as they reported what I was doing?

It's Izuna. He's eating an apple again.

"Izuna, stop that. We don't do that. We don't do that anymore."

I looked up. Anyone seeing me looking at them like I did would describe me as cute, looking young for my age with a small face, high cheekbones, a pointy chin and large, brown eyes. I, however, was completely unaware of my appearance other than the objective description of it. Small face. Brown eyes.

The nurse was looking down on me. It wasn't the one who had spoken so monotonously; this nurse would never. I liked him. Had always liked him. He was in his late thirties or early forties, I guessed, large with long, red hair in a ponytail and no beard. Steven. He had always been patient with me.

"Want to play pool?" he asked.

It was my chosen method of distraction. Or, not really. I'd just said so to make the consultant stop talking. Anything you could use to distract yourselves from your thoughts, Izuna? Anything? Jigsaw puzzles? Painting? Crosswords? Reading? Pool?

I'd said yes just to shut her up.

I dried my nose with the back of my hand while looking away from Steven.

"No", I said.

"Please?"

"Okay."

We went to the dayroom. The pool-sticks, or cues, were locked away so the patients wouldn't use them as weapons against others or, more likely, themselves if they got a tantrum. It sounded unbelievable but in all honesty, I had wished several times they wouldn't hide them so I could use them during my own tantrum. Steven, however, had the magical key, so he opened the door to the storage room and took two cues out.

From the first time I had needed that self-chosen form of distraction that had been forced on me, my exceptional brilliance in pool has always fascinated the ward staff.

"Have you played a lot?" Steven had asked me that first day half a year ago. I had been in for only a week then. Nobody knew then that it was only the beginning of something this incomprehensible. Usually, patients were in the acute ward for only a few days to stabilise. I had been here for a long time compared to that.

"This is my first time", I had said.

From there on out, the staff pretended over and over that they wanted to play with me to distract me from self-harm. But I saw through them. It was rare, but sometimes it happened that I saw through people. I knew they were fascinated by my talent. I didn't like them thinking they'd lured me into doing as they wanted so they could observe me, but I decided to double-trick them. So I pretended I let them lure me so I could watch their stupid faces as they watched me play. It was actually quite entertaining.

But I didn't treat Steven this way because I liked him. He was the only one who seemed to want to play with me out of pure enjoyment.

We played three rounds. I never missed. If I had planned on something to happen on the table, for example the red ball to go in the far-right corner while the yellow one went into the middle hole, that always happened. Always. I crushed Steven comprehensively. Yet, I felt no joy. Only a deep, odd satisfaction, too deep, in fact, for me to feel it's full magnitude as it was covered by my layers of muscle and fat and skin and too many thoughts.

"What time is it?" I asked after we'd finished and I was deemed to have been distracted enough.

"Midnight", Steven said.

"Oh... I should be in bed."

"You're thirty-seven, Izuna", Steven pointed out. "You're allowed to go to bed whenever you want."

"Oh..."

"You need a midnight snack?" Steven asked. "We have pop tarts."

I looked at him blankly. Had I had the ability to show facial expressions, my face would've told him "Eat when it's not part of my schedule? Are you out of your Goddamn mind?" I had always been fascinated by people's use of facial expressions, how the muscles in their faces worked so effortlessly together to create something as complex as an emotion. And they didn't even have to think about it! I'd spent an entire summer reading about facial expressions for hours each day. Special interest, a doctor had called it. Apparently common when you had autism.

"No", I answered flatly.

There was a soft beep. A normal person would hardly notice after such a long time in the ward, but I immediately became aware of it. The softness of the beep expanded in my ear, bounced back and forth in my ear canal until it hit my eardrums full-force in an ear-splitting scream-like sound. I bent down in a squat, put my hands over my ears. It wasn't always like that. Tonight, however, it was like that. Tonight, I realised, I was enormously sensitive, even more so than usual. It was as if I was aware of something stirring in the sky, that something was happening that was wrong, as if the moon was coming down from the sky to lay down beneath the surface of a lake to fall asleep using the lake water as it's blanket.

I felt Steven's presence above me. I looked up.

"It's fine. It's one of my patients calling for me. I'll go see to them."

I knew that the sound meant someone wanted something from a nurse; an extra sleeping pill (never granted), a midnight snack (always granted), a hug (depended). But some nights, it stressed me out.

Nights when the moon came down from the sky.

He went. I went back to the wall, picked up my Rubik's cube. I could solve it in thirty seconds now. My goal was twenty. It would take me two days or so to figure out how to short-cut the sequence and decrease my time, I estimated.

If the next person who walks past the living room is male something terrible will happen.

The thought came from absolutely nowhere. It was as if someone had placed it there, like a person walking past a trash can and dumping a piece of paper they'd found in their pocket just then. Oh! Somewhere to dump this thought! Just when I needed it! How very convenient!

I tensed up, looked at the doorway, the cube halfway through a sequence. My breathing was becoming increasingly heavy. It could be hours without anyone passing. How could I stand that? How could I stand hours of nervousness? I started trembling. I lost all conception of time.

Then, somebody walked past.

I had been so engrossed in my panic I hadn't even heard the approaching footsteps, which let me know exactly how far up in the skies I was. I always noticed every little sound. But I hadn't noticed the approaching footsteps.

It was Steven.

Male.

Of course, nothing bad would happen. I knew that. I knew that. But when my obsessive thoughts got their claws around my brain, they wouldn't let go, and the threat the claws planted there as they penetrated the gooey tissue was as real to me as a poisonous snake on my chest.

The person who had walked past was male, and something terrible would happen.

I lost it.

I completely and utterly lost it.

I curled up into a ball, held my head and screamed, banging my head hard in the wall. I felt close to vomiting because of the pain but I still couldn't stop. I was terrified. I was well and truly terrified.

"Izuna... Izuna."

It was Steven, his voice calm. But he couldn't reach me. He knew it. He didn't even try, just let me know he was there, not raising his voice because he knew I hated that, not touching me because he knew I hated that, too.

I kept screaming, kept banging my head.

"Get him off that wall!"

Another nurse. The despair in their voice terrified me and I screamed even more.

"Leave him alone", I heard Steven say firmly but calmly.

And then, something happened that broke through my panic.

The only way to stop my panic attacks was waiting them out. I had tried everything. My therapists had tried everything. My nurses had tried everything. My doctors had tried everything. My father had even tried beating me silent and, when that didn't work, fucking me silent. Even that hadn't worked.

But this time, it worked. What happened worked.

It was a noise coming from the corridor.

It sounded like a full riot. It was clear it was someone taken in by guards. That happened sometimes, so that wasn't unusual per se. But this... This was something else.

I had become dead quiet, listening. By the sound of it, it wasn't two guards as usual but four who brought this person in. His screams, because judging by the voice, which you shouldn't, it was a he, were not the usual angry demands of release. It was something else, something primitive. He sounded like a wounded animal fighting for its life and that sound turned my blood into ice, then boiled it to evaporation, then chilled it back to liquid only for it to freeze it all over again.

His screams terrified me.

I stood up, walked slowly to the door to the corridor. Steven stood back, letting me do what I wanted. I put my hands on the door frame and slowly, very slowly, I poked my head out.

I wouldn't forget what I saw for the rest of my life. The image would imprint itself in my memory forever, burn itself on my memory bank like a polaroid picture on photo paper. I did find beauty in the scene, strangely enough. But most of all, it terrified me even more than the screams had.

It wasn't four guards. It was only two. The two others were policemen. One of them had a black eye. The other had blood running from his mouth. Yet they fought to hold on to the man they'd brought in.

The man was tall, most of his length being in his legs, his shoulders broad. He wore a black sweater and dark blue jeans that were covered in blood. I couldn't see his face at first because he was turned away from me so I could only see the blood and spit sputtering from his mouth as he screamed. But as he turned round, I took a step back.

'Young', was my first thought. 'Younger than me' my second. His skin was white as burned ashes, and his hair was grey, bereaved of its colour at an early age, due to genetics or environmental factors I couldn't know, but I could still see the youth in his face. It suited him, somehow, the age gap between his hair and his skin. His eyes were pale and dull, but wide open in utter fear, matched by the tendons visible in his neck as his muscles played to allow all of his emotions to pour out in a stream of sound through his mouth.

Suddenly, the two guards and policemen managed to push him up against the wall, face first, and get his wrists behind his back.

"No!!" I screamed, shocking myself; I had never done anything even remotely similar in my life.

But I was too late as a nurse had already jabbed a syringe into his shoulder.

His knees buckled beneath him. His eyes closed, and I could see how he fought the tiredness washing over him. He lay his head on the floor, his screams slowly turning into murmurs.

I started trembling. Tears emerged in my eyes, started dripping down my face one by one until they formed a steady stream, like a waterfall that was created during a storm, and that storm was within me, creating a lake where the moon that was coming down from the sky could lay down and rest underneath it's blanket that was my tears.

I turned and I ran. I ran to my room, opened the door, shut it behind me. I went to my bed, with rounded corners to diminish the risk of injury for when patients threw them at staff, fighting the urge to throw myself on it because I knew that then, it risked moving and then it would no longer be parallel to the wall. I lay down on it carefully, lay my face in the pillow, always with the opening of the pillowcase turned to the wall, and started crying.

Not screaming like I usually did, but full-on crying. I couldn't even remember last time I cried.

I didn't know if I ever had.

This, I thought, was the most spiteful thing about my condition. I not only felt empathy for people when they experienced strong negative emotions but I actually felt those feelings myself. And I had seen what the guards hadn't seen, what the police hadn't seen, what the staff hadn't seen.

That man wasn't angry.

That man was sad.

And when I saw that man so heartbroken, so devastated, I felt it, too.

There was a knock on my door, the sound of somebody coming in. Steven. I recognised him by his heavy footsteps. If he was surprised I cried, he didn't show it. He stood in the doorway for a while, seemingly thinking. I could hear his soft breaths as if he were right beside me. I knew what he struggled with. They didn't want us to bond with healthcare staff in the acute psychiatric ward. They wanted us to hate it there so we would be motivated to get better so we could leave. So Steven knew he should just leave me be.

But he didn't. Couldn't. Maybe because he didn't see the point as I had been there half a year, anyway, while most patients only stayed for a few days. Maybe because he actually cared. No matter the reason, he went to sit on my bed.

"Careful", I said, voice thick with tears.

"About what?" he asked softly.

"I don't want my bed to move. Keep it linear."

"Will do."

He sat down painfully carefully. I waited for him to say something but he didn't. Not yet. He just sat there with me. Letting my cry out before he asked his question.

"You like him?" Steven asked.

I was too autistic to become shy of the question. Even if I was intelligent enough to know Steven, kind, kind Steven, with a wife and two children, who saw me as the little brother he'd never had even if he would never admit it, had posed an awkward question, I couldn't feel awkward. I lacked the ability to feel awkward even if I knew I was, on an intellectual plane.

"He is beautiful", I said, voice low.

"You think so?"

"Yes", I said. "He looks like the moon."