These photographs seem far away, as if I am looking at them through a telescope or just through the cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels. I am not one of them and they not part of me (see the way they stare?)— or am I? Are they? Perhaps something inside of me is begging my body just to fall, to convulse, to give up and struggle and fight and thrash (for to stay calm and contained is not to give up but to persevere) like the girl in the white dress throwing herself placidly to the floor, caught by a man in uniform. Something inside tells me every day to take off all my clothes and ride my bicycle through Yonkers and to the library, where I will paint on a massive canvas, maybe the carpet in the Millenium Room, with my feet.
And though when I first read the notes from Ellen’s doctor, I felt sick in my stomach, nauseated by her nausea. But when she spoke instead of the doctor (why so many men in uniforms)—I know that I am Ellen, but worse, because I forget that I am Ellen and she is reminded every day by the white white white uniforms and white white white walls. She swallows pills and counts slices of bread but I forget about pills and even more I forget about bread and only remember when I go to sleep that I have forgotten all bread all day, maybe all day yesterday as well, and maybe even the whole day before yesterday.
The asylum is to remember to forget. The uniforms tell you to forget, to release, to never remember what you knew before. They say that if you forget two pieces of bread, you will remember four. But I know that when you forget bread, you forget bread and that is all.
We must remember. We must hold on, to the pieces of bread, both in their fourness and twoness, to the white white white walls and to the blue blue blue sky, to the uniform and to the dresses and to the dark purple suits. We must be conscious, for to be conscious is to be human; to be conscious is to exist.
Ellen- remember your bread. And remember it in plenty.
