Just Charlie

Charlie always says no. Confidently but not with so much force as to raise any flags. Direct, make eye contact, no embellishing, then move on. Sometimes the interviewer will elaborate, a subtle attempt to casually redirect, asking the same question with other language to provoke a different response. Charlie's been at this for a while, she knows the drill, sees it coming miles before the neural synapses have even fired in the doctor or nurse or social worker or psychiatrist sitting in front of her. On a third attempt to question her once, the triage nurse started speaking uncomfortably loud and very slowly, as if Charlie was either deaf, mentally challenged, a foreign student or all three. Maybe it was the hapi coat and chopsticks in her crazy dreadlocked hair, who knows. Her asian phase has long passed. Regardless, the blue eyes, fierce red hair and freckles should've been a dead giveaway. The problem with a technologically advanced medical system in the largest city in the country  is that once a note gets logged in by some lackey its permanently on her file. The mark of a psych patient. She's never seen it but she imagines it's some sort of italicized, colour coded verbiage that lets anyone reading it see that she has been in the past and may once again become mentally unstable. Hence the 21 questions all driving back to the same thing: have you ever or do you now have thoughts about harming yourself. Are you a danger to your own well being. Charlie can't help but see the irony. Who isn't? She can't remember a time when she wasn't an issue to herself. Uncommunicative at home, struggling in school, the painful, awkward adolescence, filled with intense affairs and experimentations that ended in disaster, unbridled, explosive bliss or the threat of marriage. Her parents checked out when she was way too young, far away from each other and little old Charlie. She grew up alone; an island in the middle of chaos and seclusion. She's made it this far and finally feels like there's nothing left to prove, or discover, or fight for. Autonomy has it's  advantages. If she disappears, it's inconsequential. Sure there's the matter of her personal belongings, some bills and savings, a cat, the Sunday runs. But there are no kids, no regular job, no mortgage or partner or vacation getaway. This is her happily ever after.  Just Charlie. She calls it detachment. The shrink says she's depressed, suicidal. Despondent. She could care less. And that's her point.