Tell Me I Wasn’t Crazy | confessional fiction
♪: the good kind of tomorrow
by fleeting joys
c/w: delusional, unreliable narrator
There was a girl in the ward who painted crosses on her arms with toothpaste. Always diagonal, always just above the veins. Another girl used to whisper to the water fountain like it was a confessional booth — full body leaning into the chrome, fingers pressed like it was listening. Someone had carved the word LIARS under one of the hallway windowsills with a bent fork. The nurses pretended they didn’t see it. The lights flickered and buzzed with that high, insect-like whine that made everyone meaner by 4pm. Breakfast always tasted like static. Wet metal, powdered eggs, soggy toast. The couches in the common room were speckled with cigarette burns, even though no one was allowed to smoke. Even though they checked our sleeves and shoes and gums and sometimes even our hair. The staff sat like they were being watched. Which they were. We all were.
I came in during a rainstorm. Not metaphorically. The sky was actually breaking open. My socks were soaked through because I stepped in a puddle trying to run back to get my charger. It didn’t matter. They took it from me anyway. One of the nurses offered me a pair of used slippers — pink with faded white hearts, size 9. I’m a 6.5. They flopped when I walked. Left sticky, half-moon outlines on the linoleum like cartoon footprints. Someone had thrown up in the corner on my second day. No one cleaned it. The air smelled like bleach and something sweet rotting under it. I remember thinking: this place doesn’t want me to get better. It just wants me to shut up.
They told me I was here for PTSD. I told them I had schizophrenia. It made more sense that way. It was easier to say “I see things,” than “I see my mother’s body in places it doesn’t belong.” Easier to say “I hear voices,” than “I hear her scream every time I blink too hard.” I didn’t want to explain the way I used to hide in the closet and count the cracks in the floorboards while my father slammed her against the walls. Or how sometimes the sounds stopped so suddenly it felt worse than when they didn’t. How he’d call her sweet names while hurting her, and how I learned that love could sound like begging. I wanted them to think I was sick, not haunted. Sick could be treated. Medicated. Managed. Sick meant I might leave one day. Haunted meant I carried everything with me. Haunted meant I belonged here forever.
You were one of the staff. One of the good ones. Maybe the only one who didn’t look at me like I might bite, or break, or melt into the floor. You were tall in that slouched, boyish way that made it look like you hadn’t noticed you’d grown. You wore your ID clipped to your shoelaces. I never asked why. You brought your own iced coffee every morning in a scratched-up clear tumbler and chewed the ice like a bored teenager. You said “dude” too often. Laughed too loud for a place like this. The laugh of someone who hadn’t been told to be quiet enough times yet. You gave everyone nicknames. Called the girl with the fairy arms “wings.” Called the boy who bit his knuckles “chomp.” But not me. You said my name like it had teeth.
The first time we spoke, you asked if I wanted to join the morning group. I said no. You said cool, then sat across from me anyway and asked if I liked turtles. I thought it was a trick. It wasn’t. You just wanted to talk about turtles. You told me you had one as a kid and that it ran away. I said turtles can’t run. You said, “Exactly.” You smiled like you’d been waiting years for someone to set you up for that punchline.
That’s how it started.
I began memorizing your shoes. The way your socks never matched, one foot always brighter. I started watching your hands: how you tapped your knuckles against your thigh when you were thinking, how your fingernails were always just a little too long, how you held pens like weapons. I counted how many seconds you lingered at the nurse’s desk. Timed my bathroom breaks to pass you in the hallway. I started collecting scraps of you wherever I could — offhand jokes, your half-smiles, the shape your mouth made when you were trying not to laugh. You made everything feel a little less sterile, like this place wasn’t trying to erase me.
Sometimes we traded horror stories like kids at a sleepover — only ours were too small and too real to be scary to anyone else. I told you about the girl who swallowed a glue stick to keep herself from falling apart. You told me about a patient who named every cockroach in the unit and cried when they disappeared. We made up a game: pick the creepiest object in the room every day. You always picked the clown mug above the TV — too wide-eyed, too proud of itself. I picked the warped mirror near the staff bathroom, the one that stretched your face out just enough to make you look wrong. Like something trying too hard to be human. We kept score. You looked proud when you won. I let you win more than once.
You once showed me how to fold a paper crane out of a meal calendar. Mine came out crooked and bruised-looking, with one wing curled in like it had something to hide. You called it abstract. I said it looked like it limped away from a car crash. We named it Bruce. Left him on the windowsill and checked on him like he was real. When he disappeared, I didn’t ask. I pretended he flew off. You didn’t mention it either, but I think you knew.
Another time, we tried to come up with a pun using the word asylum. I said “As I’m losing it.” You laughed too hard, like it actually deserved it. You said “Welcome to the pun-stitution.” I groaned so loud a nurse looked over. You grinned like a kid showing off something ugly he was still proud of. I told you it was stupid. You said, “Yeah, but it worked,” and bumped your knee against mine. I felt it all day.
I think I only laughed out loud three times that month. All three were your fault.
One rainy Monday, I was walking past the nurse’s station when I heard one of them say you were “cute in a dumb way,” and my throat burned before I even understood why. I didn’t stop. Just kept walking. But I imagined her getting into a car crash. A small one. Enough to scar her but not kill her.
I started dreaming about you. Not even in a way that would make sense. Just soft things. You brushing my hair. You reading me a story in the dark while I tried not to cry. You reaching out to hold my wrist — not to stop me, just to make sure I was still there. Once I dreamt I was small enough to fit in your pocket. You carried me around all day. No one noticed. You fed me Skittles and told me I was safe now. I woke up sobbing so hard I bit through the sleeve of my hoodie.
Then one day — god, it wasn’t even special—you saw me clawing at my own face during a group session. It was over nothing. Someone coughed too loud. Someone else laughed after. My brain couldn’t place where I was anymore. My fingers twitched like they were trying to unzip my skin. I remember the color of the carpet: this muddy oatmeal shade with little blue threads woven in, like veins. I remember staring at a crumb near my knee and thinking it looked like a dead bug. My chest felt like it had been pressurized. I couldn’t breathe without swallowing noise. It felt like my skin didn’t belong to me anymore. Like I was wearing someone else’s body and they were trying to get back inside it, banging on the door from the inside, screaming through my ears.
Everyone froze. That’s the thing about pain— people treat it like fire. They step back. They hold their breath. They wait for someone else to be brave first. The girl next to me scooted her chair a few inches to the right. One of the boys turned his head like he didn’t want to see me falling apart, in case it was contagious. The counselor on duty said my name, once, quietly, like she was apologizing for it.
But you didn’t freeze.
You moved.
You came closer — not cautious, not slow. You just moved like it was the most natural thing in the world. Sat down on the floor beside me, legs crossed, elbows resting on your knees like we were just two people hanging out at a bus stop. Like I wasn’t trying to peel myself open. Like I wasn’t halfway between a blackout and a scream.
You didn’t say ‘stop.’ You didn’t say ‘calm down.’ You didn’t ask me what was wrong. You didn’t reach for the panic button clipped to your walkie-talkie or call for backup or use my name like a leash.
You just looked at me and said, “Hey. You’re okay. I’m here.”
That was it. Just that. Like it was enough.
And somehow, it was.
The sound of your voice moved through me like warm water. Not cold enough to shock me back into the room. Just warm enough to remind me I still had bones. That I still had a body and it only belonged to me. You didn’t touch me. You didn’t need to. Your closeness did something touch couldn’t — it told me I hadn’t scared you away. That I didn’t have to be small to be safe. That you were going to stay even if I got worse.
That was when I decided you loved me, too.
I know what that sounds like. I know. I’m not stupid. I just needed something. Something that didn’t scream. Something that didn’t look away. Something that didn’t smell like blood and cheap perfume and the inside of a dark closet. You felt safe. You felt real. You made dumb jokes and chewed ice too loud and talked to everyone like you hadn’t already read their file. You looked people in the eye when they were sobbing or screaming or both and didn’t flinch, didn’t glance at the clock or the door or your clipboard. Everyone else looked at me like I was about to erupt — like there was something festering underneath my skin that might leak out and ruin their shoes. But you? You looked at me like I wasn’t broken. Like I wasn’t a red-flagged chart or a potential incident report. Like I wasn’t a cautionary whisper behind the nurse’s desk. You didn’t try to fix me. You didn’t walk on eggshells. You just stayed near me like it didn’t cost you anything. You just existed by my side like that wasn’t a dangerous thing to do.
So I kissed you.
I’m not proud of it. I’m not sorry either. I think those two things can live in the same mouth at once. It happened in the library, which was really just a glorified supply closet with a creaky fan and a shelf of used paperbacks, half of them water-stained and swollen like they’d been read in the bath by someone depressed. You were showing me a poetry book because you said I reminded you of a line by Sylvia Plath — something about bees and blood and the unbearable heaviness of being soft in a world that doesn’t want to hold anything too long. I told you I didn’t get it. You said I didn’t have to. That some things are meant to be felt, not solved. I remember your thumb brushing the edge of a page. I remember thinking how stupid the human body is for storing this much ache in something so breakable.
I said “I love you” before I realized I was going to say it. Like the sentence had been waiting under my chest, growing bitter. And then I got on my tiptoes and kissed you. Quick. Desperate. My lips barely touched yours — more breath than skin, more collapse than contact. It wasn’t a kiss so much as a reaching. You pulled back like you’d been electrocuted. Like the air between us had suddenly become made of glass.
You said my name.
That’s all. Just my name. Like a question. Like a warning. Like it wasn’t mine anymore
And that’s when I saw her. The girl who painted fairies on her arms. She was standing in the doorway, holding a puzzle box, staring like she’d walked in on a crime scene but didn’t know who the victim was. Her mouth was slightly open. She looked at me like I’d killed something. Maybe I had. She blinked twice, turned around, and walked away without saying anything. I don’t know how long she’d been there. I don’t know what she told them.
I ran before you could say anything else. Before you could fix it. Before you could tell me I was wrong. Or worse, that you forgave me.
That night, during meds, a nurse asked me if anything happened in the library. Her voice was light — fake, like a balloon about to pop. I looked straight ahead and said nothing. I watched a moth beat itself to death against the ceiling light. I didn’t say your name. That was my first act of defiance. Or kindness.
The week after that felt like living underwater. Everything was too slow and too loud. I started skipping meals. I’d sit at the breakfast table and count how many grains of rice were on my plate, then flick them one by one onto the floor. I started pulling my sleeves down over my hands, even when I was alone. The nurses started treating me like I was glassware from a dead grandma’s cabinet — too precious to touch, but already cracked. Someone said you were going to get fired. Someone else said you were just suspended. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know if I was the reason you vanished or if I’d imagined the whole thing. Even you.
The other kids started looking at me differently too. I could feel it — how their eyes stuck to me longer than they used to, like gum under a desk. One boy whispered something and laughed when I passed by, the way boys laugh when they think they’re safe in groups. I didn’t hear what he said. I didn’t have to. The fairy girl stopped painting her arms. Her sleeves got longer. She looked away when I sat down, like I carried something infectious. One of the quiet ones, a girl with a lisp and knees always scabbed from prayer pose, told the others I gave her ’bad vibes.’ Whatever that means. She bowed her head when she caught me staring. She offered me her extra pudding cup the next day. I didn’t take it.
I started seeing you everywhere. In the reflective blur of the TV screen, in the flash of movement behind the nurses’ station, in the way the hallway door creaked open just slightly too slow. I knew you weren’t really there. Or maybe I didn’t. Once, I hallucinated you were inside my pillow, curled up like a tiny pet I’d forgotten to feed. You blinked at me with tender, tired eyes. I didn’t sleep that night. I didn’t trust myself not to crush you. Another time, I thought I saw your name carved into the foam of my mattress. I traced it with my finger for hours. By morning, it was gone. Or maybe it was never there.
I tried to be good. I really did. I brushed my teeth even when my gums bled, pressing the bristles too hard because I read somewhere that pain rewires your brain. I wrote my therapy goals in bubble letters with a purple gel pen. I wrote things like ’Use my voice’ and ’Learn to trust again’ even though I didn’t believe in either. I complimented the new girl’s mismatched socks — one with frogs, one with ghosts— because I remembered you once said frogs were underrated. I drew pictures of hands holding other hands. Sometimes I drew them too tight, fingers digging in like claws. Sometimes I made the wrists bleed.
I told myself if I just behaved, if I swallowed the crazy down far enough, if I played nice and folded my own laundry and didn’t mention the bugs and eyes in my walls, maybe you’d come back. Maybe you’d look at me like a person again. Not like a mistake. Not like a moment you couldn’t unlive. Maybe I could shrink the damage down small enough to bury it in the lost and found bin.
But then the silence got too loud. It started to hum. It started to scream. So I left you a note.
I wrote it on the back of a coloring sheet. A fox standing in a meadow, smiling in that empty cartoon way animals smile when they don’t know they’re about to be hunted. I didn’t even color it in. It felt wrong to make something cheerful. I folded it seven times, like an origami wish or a spell that only worked if no one else saw it. I slipped it under your office door during rec time, pretending I was tying my shoe.
I wrote,
If you hate me, I’ll kill myself. If you don’t — prove it.
No greeting. No name. Just a dare. But I meant it. I didn’t want kindness. I wanted truth. I wanted you to show up. Or disappear completely. I wanted anything but this unbearable maybe.
That night, I found you in the laundry room. Or maybe you found me. I was sitting on the floor, knees tucked to my chest like I was trying to fold myself into something small enough to forgive. Like if I just compacted myself tight enough, I could disappear without dying. I was chewing the skin off my thumb. Thinking, if I peeled enough layers, I’d find a girl inside me who hadn’t ruined everything. The dryer was rattling in the background, a button clinking in the metal drum over and over like a distant heartbeat.
You didn’t say anything at first. You just sat beside me. Not close enough to touch. Not far enough to forget. You smelled like dryer sheets and guilt and maybe shampoo. The clean kind. The kind that tries to smell like pine trees but just ends up smelling like absence. You sat with your hands loose in your lap. I hated how calm you looked. Like you weren’t afraid of what I’d do. Like you’d already decided something.
I asked you, “Did I ruin your life?”
You didn’t answer.
So I laughed. A dry, ugly sound that made the back of my throat itch. I said, “I could ruin it, you know. I could tell them you touched me. I could cry and scream and make them believe it.” And I meant it. And I didn’t. My voice cracked on the word believe. I didn’t mean to. But it was the only word I still wanted from someone. I wanted to be believed, even if I was lying. Even if I was lost. I wanted to matter enough to destroy something.
You still didn’t speak.
I turned to you. My mouth shaking when I said, "But I won’t. Because I love you. That’s how you know I really do.”
You inhaled like it hurt. Like every word I spoke lodged somewhere inside you, pressing down on something vital.
And then, I asked it. Not because I expected an answer — but because I needed to hear it out loud.
"Was it real?"
It wasn’t just a question. It was a scalpel. A confession. A mirror held to your face, waiting for the truth to crack. A verdict disguised as a plea. A lifeline or a loaded gun — it didn’t matter. As long as it hit something.
"Tell me it was real." I said, "Tell me I wasn’t making it up. Tell me you felt it too. Or — call me crazy. Say I’m wrong. Confirm what the others say about me."
I wasn’t asking if you loved me. I was asking you to decide what kind of girl I was. I was handing you the last piece of me I hadn’t yet ruined. The version of me that still believed in what happened. The girl who needed this to mean something — anything — so she wouldn’t shatter beneath the weight of imagining it all.
I wanted you to prove me wrong or prove me real. Deny or validate. Either way, I needed something to split the silence.
Because if you said yes, then I wasn’t delusional. I was chosen. I was real. You were too. I hadn’t imagined the heat of your eyes or the gravity of your presence. I hadn’t made a god out of someone who was only ever human.
But if you said no — if you looked me in the eye and told me it meant nothing — then I was just like they said I was. Too much. Too broken. A cautionary tale in a hospital gown with chewed-up sleeves and a mouth full of need. I’d be the girl who made it up. Who reached for something that was never hers. Who mistook presence for love. Who kissed someone and thought it meant she existed.
You hesitated. Not because you didn’t know the answer. But because you knew what it would mean. That it would become the story I’d tell myself for the rest of my life. It would build me or break me. Save me or curse you. And you understood that. You knew there was no walking out of this room without hurting one of us. Maybe both.
If you said yes, you were breaking every rule they made you swear to follow. You’d be giving weight to something that was supposed to stay weightless. You’d be stepping into the role I already cast you in — the one you never asked for.
If you said no, you’d be handing me back to the ward, to the files, to the looks the other kids gave me when I walked past. You’d be confirming what the staff already believed — that I was a girl who saw things that weren’t there. That I invented love the way other kids invented imaginary friends. That nothing ever loved me, not even once.
if you said nothing — you were a coward.
But if you said everything — you were a monster.
So you looked away. You didn’t meet my eyes. But after awhile, you finally answered — “Yeah. I felt a connection too.”
You said it quietly. Like you wanted the words to land gently, without damage. Like you were hoping I wouldn’t hold them too hard.
But I did. Of course I did. I was fourteen, and starving, and soft in all the wrong places. Of course I held it. Because to me, a ’connection’ was the closest thing I’d ever had to proof. To medicine. To love.
And before you could explain — before you could say “not like that,” or “not in the way you think,” or “not the way you want” — I lunged forward and hugged you. Clung to you like I wanted to crawl under your skin and hide there. Like I thought if I held you tight enough, I could keep the moment from ending. You didn’t pull away. You let me stay there for a moment too long. Your hands hovered like they didn’t know where they were allowed to touch. I think I said thank you. I think I said it too many times. I think I meant it. I think I needed to.
That was the last time. I didn’t see you again after that.
Not in the halls. Not during meds. Not behind the nurses’ station, sipping your stupid iced coffee cup with the chewed metal straw that made your gums glint when you smiled. Your name stayed on the whiteboard outside your office for three more days — written in red marker, underlined once like an afterthought. Then it vanished without ceremony. No crossed-out letters. No farewell card. Just gone. Like you’d never been here at all. Like you were part of someone else’s delusion they finally stopped indulging. Someone else took your place—a man with skin like boiled chicken and a too-tight ponytail who never laughed. He wore his badge on a lanyard dangling across his chest. He didn’t say my name like it mattered. He barely said it at all.
No one talked about what happened. Or if they did, they did it carefully — mouths pressed close together, glances darting in the corner of the room. The fairy girl went back to painting her arms, only now with glitter glue that peeled off in perfect crescent moons. She stopped sitting beside me. The boy who used to whisper and laugh when I passed by started avoiding eye contact like he was scared I’d see myself in him. One nurse asked how I was doing in a tone so soft it felt like pity. I told her I was fine. Then I went to the staff bathroom and vomited quietly. I blamed it on the morning yogurt.
I started folding my clothes without being told. Made my bed like I meant it. Smoothed the sheets, tucked the corners. I wiped down the sink after brushing my teeth. I said thank you when I didn’t mean it. I smiled when the new girl complimented my handwriting, even though I’d started writing in all caps just to feel less like myself. I drew more hands during art therapy — open ones this time. Palms up. Not clawing. Not closed. I stopped talking to the version of you that lived inside my pillowcase. I stopped hoping I’d see your shape in the cracks between the doors. I even colored in the fox on the meadow. Made the grass too green, made the sky purple like lilacs, made the fox look like it was smiling because it wanted to, not because it had to.
Eventually, they told me I was getting discharged. It was a Thursday. The sky looked like wet notebook paper. I remember because someone had drawn raindrops on the dry-erase board and written Don’t forget your meds! in block letters beside them. I packed my things into a zippered duffel bag that still smelled like the thrift store. I left behind the socks with the stretched-out elastic and the notebook I’d torn through on week three. I kept the poems you showed me. Even the one I didn’t understand. Especially that one.
I thought about writing to you. About folding another piece of paper into something that looked like forgiveness. I thought about slipping it under the office door that no longer had your name taped to it. I thought about saying everything I hadn’t said out loud. That I was sorry. That I meant it. That I didn’t. That I knew you didn’t love me. That I still needed to believe, for a moment, that you could have.
But I didn’t.
Because I knew it wouldn’t free me. And worse, it wouldn’t free you.
So instead, I stayed quiet. For once. Because maybe this was the only real thing I could give you — the absence of consequence. The mercy of letting it all stay between us, unproven, unfinished. You gave me something you weren’t supposed to. Not love. Not even care, maybe. But presence. Steadiness. That impossible, dangerous gift of being seen and not flinched away from. I could have ruined you for it. But I didn’t. I could have turned that moment into a weapon. I could have made it bigger, louder, more damning. But instead, I made it small. I kept it quiet. I let it die with dignity.
I walked out the same way I came in. Through a heavy door that hissed when it closed, like the building was exhaling me. I didn’t look back. I didn’t look for your car in the parking lot. I didn’t expect a goodbye. I didn’t need one. Wanting something is not the same as needing it. That’s something I learned in here. That, and how to fold corners properly so your socks stack flat.
But in my bag, between the pages of a library book with cracked binding and someone else’s name penciled into the cover, I left one page just for you. Not to give. Not to send. Just to keep. In case I ever needed to remember that I could’ve wrecked you — and didn’t. In case you ever wondered if I hated you for not being the person I invented.
It said,
You were the first person to ever truly see me. And I loved you in the wrong way. But I loved you all the same. I won’t say your name. That’s my gift to you.