I had fallen to the bottom. All the blood I had lost had finally caught up with me. I awoke as the nurse was telling me good morning and the lab would be in soon to test my urine. I got up with a sandy feeling in my eyes and brushed my teeth feeling sick and sultry from not having showered the night before. The bathroom was small, dense, and brown with a small two-knobbed sink and shower. Its mirror was not made of glass, but of steel. I rinsed and finished up without looking into it, switched off the light, and walked out of the room and into the hallway like a zombie---droopy-eyed and half alive. During her usual rounds, another African-American nurse pointed all around my arms and shook her head in shame at the black, red, open-lipped wounds that appeared to brighten and smile for her as the other nurse took my blood pressure. I sat there, expressionless, knees up, arms out, with a thermometer sticking out of my mouth while I felt the light weight of a red and white band loosened around my wrist that told my name, age, birth date, and gender. I kept thinking, “They must look down on me because I’m the suicidal one.” I quickly rejected this and then thought, “This is a mental hospital. These people suck blood out of people like me every passing day.” I was happy to give it to them. The peculiar thing about being there was being so familiar with a place I had never been before. Of all the books I’ve read and films I’ve seen, that place was nothing new to me. I knew, that one day, I was bound to end up there. I just kept thinking, “Gee, what a way to spend the summer of my sophomore year.”
For all of that time I had wished I had my iPod with me but, according to the nurses, I was most likely to hang myself with the headphones. But from all of that, I thought of Akira Yamaoka’s piece, Promise, from the terrifying film and video game, Silent Hill. The bizarre melody takes me to a place; a sort of sinister sanctuary in which I’ve always resided in. The music conveys a dark tale of macabre, agony, and laments of loss. The piece, after it appeared in the video game, also appeared in the film; a story of a mother who has lost her daughter and struggles through a journey of sheer horror, in a morbid limbo of darkness and death, where she must save her daughter from a hostile group of religious fanatics who accuse her of being sin incarnate. For me, I’d say I lost faith in simply everything: life, love, and all light. The world was one bulging black lie and nothing made any sense but the fiction filed neatly in my mind.
This song takes me to my own personal refuge, a world where I have to look for my fate and all my gloomy views are displayed like a reel in front of me---only this time, I’m in the reel. The title conveys a message to me, a promise. A promise of going deeper into the bowels of my mind and making it bloom into a glass camellia of blood and ruby red. This piece explores the fate of the unknown, gives it a sound of sullen mystery and apprehension, yet the melody forces you to explore it and fall deeper into the core. The days I spent in a mental hospital made my state of mind clearer and forced me to become familiar with it and, in the end, I befriended it. I fell deeper into my sub-conscious and, ever since then, I have never come out of it. I don’t think I ever will. This song
has shown me that. Towards the beginning of June 2008, I died a little and when I awoke once again, this song was a prelude to my resurrection and told me, “Here’s who you are going to be for the rest of your life.”
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: 山岡晃 - True
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