It was like picking up a thousand tiny pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But I was the puzzle and I’d been shaken and broken, splintered.

There were parts where I’d forced lives which didn’t fit back together.

It all jumbled together in my mind like the broken washing machine in the hospital, my brain was all jammed and mushed up- ‘out of order’.

I reread the ‘staying calm’ board ritually, there’s advertisements for Headspace and other apps.

But I don’t have a phone or any access to the time to count my breaths, so my heartbeat is my rhythm, my dancing home.

Dance.

They gave me dance lessons I recall but there was no ball.

I ask for a poppy as it’s November.

‘No pins’ I’m told ‘you can have a clip on’.

As if I didn’t already feel like a child with the forced mealtimes and nighttime checks.

And my family and friends visit me in the room with the elephants and tigers on the wall, toys on the floor.

In those weeks people said it was like a fuse had gone in my head, that my nerves were frazzled, my neurons frayed.

‘A fuse can be a device on a bomb or firework which delays the explosion so that people can move a safe distance away’, and everyone had moved away.

But they were safe and that’s all that mattered.

And I’d shot off into the sky: a bright green effervescent blaze, rupturing, bursting, shattering.

I felt watched.

A spectacle.

I’d tried podcasts, CBD oil, meditation, the usual as well as illicit substances searching for peace.

But sleep was never tangible, no she was a swirling mystery to me: I hadn’t felt her embrace in weeks.

And when I did it was in nightmarish stints.

I could barely stand to shower I was shaking falling falling apart, puzzle pieces everywhere…all across the bathroom floor.

The nights are the worst.

Alarms sound as one of us tries to escape.

There’s running, screaming, fighting with the nurses.

Not me mind.

I just lie there, door locked, but sleep eludes me while insomnia deludes me.

Sometimes I imagined you were there with me, and it was your hand that guided me through the darkness, stitching me back together.

‘Where are you, where are you?’ echoed my voice inside my head.

I know your silence isn’t your absence.

One year on.

And my poppy has a pin in it now.