"I seem to need a break from reality--

You seem to need an overdose of it."

Eun Mi’s eyes were barely able to stay open. Long lashes, weighing ten pounds each, gently brushed against the fading violet of dark circles, casting a soft shadow left unnoticed and uncared for. Her cheeks were pale, deprived of the natural flush they held when she smiled, and her lips were chapped and broken, a thin layer of pink rising above the light blue they had become.

Even the tip of her nose, the same one her mother had once compared to a puppy’s when she was a child, had begun to blend in with the white bed sheets.

The rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor had become nothing short of a haunting song, it’s every sound creating a pattern of anxious glances being thrown toward the figure attached to it. Choked sobs and soft words, some spoken too carelessly and others too quietly, were all that broke the hypnotic lullaby Eun Mi was slowly becoming too frustrated to hear anymore.

“Her vital signs are stable. She’s in no immediate danger. Well, not anymore.”

Dark brown irises watched from under heavy eyelids as the blurred figure of a man, whom she had assumed was the doctor who had treated her, flipped through the perfectly organized papers restricted by a clipboard. He seemed to stop at each page, skim each syllable carefully but quickly, before nodding to himself and continuing on.

He always the pad of his thumb before moving the page out of the way, his other hand clutching the steel clipboard as if his life depended on it. His knuckles, flushed a dark pink on the hand switching papers, had become dangerously pale on the other.

Eun Mi was never one for noticing the simple details, ignoring the way a person’s nose repeatedly crinkled before they sneezed or how one’s lips trembled before the tears reached them, but she had no other option to entertain herself.

“You’ve probably heard this too many times already but,” He held the clipboard to his side now, under his arm, as he begun to speak again. “She’s really lucky. One slip, one small adjustment, of the wrist and she would have died before she was able to call the paramedics.”

Reminders as sharp as razor blades seemed to be dancing off of the doctor’s lips. They stung, like a freshly opened wound being dipped into a tub of salt water, and she knew they would most likely leave a scar.

One more to add to her morbid collection, she supposed.

Eun Mi couldn’t quite tell if she was purposefully avoiding the blurred figures she managed to recognize as her parents, or if she was simply too drugged and exhausted to even bother. They wouldn’t be there for long, anyway, and she wasn’t sure if they would even want to speak with her in the first place. All she could remember hearing from them for the past day or two was mournful cries and ever incessant sniffling.

“Is there any good news?” Ah. She could recognize her mother’s voice from miles away. It was small, a stereotypically woman’s voice, with the gentlest reminder of an accent on the tip of her tongue. Eun Mi had to remember, after all, her mother learned Korean only a few years before marrying.

“With every batch of bad news, comes good news of course.” The doctor seemed all too cheery to announce his seemingly inspirational mantra. Eun Mi assumed it was a learned trait to make the atmosphere so light, despite the incredibly grim and almost taboo situation.

She could almost hear her parents plaster a small smile on their lips and she wondered why she hadn’t noticed they loved her so much. Clouded judgment, she assumed. Her eyelids seemed to weigh down even more now, an extra ten pounds added to them as she struggled to keep them open, while she awaited the rest of the doctor’s statement.

“The good news is she can leave the Intensive Care Unit today.”

Finally.

“But she’ll have to attend our Psychiatric Unit after an evaluation by our resident Psychoanalyst.”

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