Institutional Love

It’s always cold. Snow falls off the roof sometimes. The building across from me is at eye level. I like to watch it fall.

My Roommate doesn’t. She likes to watch her phone mostly, sometimes her laptop. I like the laptop too. I look at the light reflecting on me. I flick my arm and stare at the glass of my window. The laptop illuminates the bones. The indents of my arm are crescents. They look like the moon.

The people outside my window yell. That is why I like the laptop. The light reflecting on my arm. I can look out my window and see only myself. When it is dark, I see only the snow.

My Roommate likes the cold. She stands outside basking. I see it from the window.

She comes back loud. I want to cry. I hide under my blankets. She calls me her fawn while laughing.

I do not like the cold. I cannot be left alone too long in it. My Roommate takes me on walks. She tells me it is policy. I need movement. Sometimes She leaves me out because I am too loud mostly I am silent. Sometimes She does not like the silence.

My feet ache. My pens fall into my coat. There is a place to stick my finger through in my pocket. I fish them out. This takes me some time. The ache grows. My socks make a slushing sound.

My Roommate finds me when sun is higher and then lower. I am hungry. She is not laughing and I am not her fawn. My pens have fallen again.

I like to write with them. I sit in the snow and draw out my name. I can see it later when the sun is gone. I can see it from my window.

My Roommate doesn’t like my pens. She thinks they are silly. She tells me I am silly and then She will not call me anything. She goes to her side of the room until it is her time to leave. She doesn’t look at me when She leaves. I keep the pens.

When She leaves, I want my Mother, but She has left. She didn’t like the cold. The window there was bigger. I could see the snow clearly. Mother was with me before, when I was not as cumbersome. That is one of Roommate’s favorite words. Cumbersome. I am cumbersome.

Mother is not here.

I look at my arm and flick it. It is sharp. I dig my nails in. Crescents again.

My soup has not come. Sometimes I get no soup at all, and sometimes I get more than soup. It depends on Roommate. She gives me soup or meat or greens and sometimes fruit. Usually nothing after I have been silly.

My problem, says Roommate, is I am silly by nature. I asked her once why. Silly seems the opposite of good. I try to be good, Mother told me to. The goodness escapes me, like water running down my window, melting from the roof.

Nature, Roommate says, is how the Lord made me.

Roommate likes to remind me of this. That She is like the Lord and I am fawn. She brushes my hair soft when fawn, hard when silly. Sometimes She brushes hard because She is mad about other me’s.

The door clicks when my Roommate leaves. It clicks before She enters and clicks after She leaves.

Roommate needs to deal with the other me-s, She says. Sometimes other me gets to leave the room. Other me is outside. I can hear the steps. Other me is like me, but probably fawns more.

Other me-s scream when Roommates make them. Roommate only sometimes makes me scream. She is kind in that way. It is her nature, maybe.

Other me still lives here, though. I hear them through the walls. If I were to scream, they would hear me too. We are connected in this way.