What is your favorite place to go in your city?
Saturday, 17th November 1984
They keep asking me the same questions. What’s your name. Where do you live. What’s your favourite place to go in your city. As if I’m supposed to have answers lined up like tins on a shelf. As if there’s a city left inside my head at all.
Saturday. They said it’s Saturday. The seventeenth. November. The numbers don’t mean anything but I write them down in my mind anyway, over and over, because if I stop the walls start breathing. In and out. In and out. Like lungs. Like the whole building’s got a pulse and I’m trapped inside something living.
My favourite place. Christ. They want me to tell them about favourite places when I can’t even remember my own face without looking in the metal sheet they call a mirror. But I’ll tell you what comes back sometimes, in flashes. A street. Grey stone, wet with rain. Chip shop on the corner, vinegar smell cutting through the diesel fumes. Not pretty. Not one of those places you’d put on a postcard. But it was mine, wasn’t it? Or somebody’s. I can feel the pavement under my feet, the cold coming up through my shoes. Winter coat too thin. Always too thin. I’d walk there when things got bad at – wherever I lived. Wherever that was. The people there didn’t ask questions. Didn’t look at you twice. You could disappear there and nobody would notice. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember. Maybe I wanted to disappear.
But that’s not the real answer, is it? The real answer is somewhere else. Locked up tight. There’s something I’m not supposed to know. Something they’re not supposed to know. I can feel it sometimes, right at the back of my throat, like I’m about to speak and then it just – stops. Like someone’s hand over my mouth. My own hand maybe.
They think I’m lying. The doctors, the police, whoever the hell comes through that door. They think I’m putting it on, the not remembering. But you can’t fake the way your breath catches when they say a certain word and you don’t know why. You can’t fake the panic. It’s right there in my chest, heart going like a hammer, and I don’t even know what I’m afraid of.
I must have done something. Must have. They don’t lock you up like this for nothing. Not in a place like this. The walls are green, that horrible institutional green they paint everything. Schools, hospitals, prisons. All the same colour. All the same smell. Disinfectant and something underneath. Fear, probably. Decades of it, soaked into the concrete.
There was a woman in the corridor yesterday. Or last week. Time’s funny here. She was crying, saying they’d taken her baby. Saying nobody would tell her where her baby was. And I wanted to help her but I couldn’t because I don’t even know where I am, do I? I don’t know if I’ve got a baby somewhere. I don’t know if I’m a mother or a murderer or just mad. Maybe all three.
What’s your favourite place to go in your city. The question keeps coming back. Mocking me. Because the truth is, the place I want to go is the place I’ve already lost. The place before. Before whatever happened happened. Before the forgetting. Before they brought me here. That’s my favourite place. The place where I knew who I was.
But someone’s hidden it from me. Or I’ve hidden it from myself. That’s what they don’t understand. Sometimes the worst secrets are the ones you keep from yourself. Sometimes you wake up and your whole life’s been wiped away and you think – maybe that was mercy. Maybe I did that on purpose. Maybe what I can’t remember is worse than this.
My pulse is slowing now. The breathing of the walls is getting quieter. They’ll come with the medication soon. The little paper cup, the tablets that make everything soft around the edges. I take them because what else is there? And besides, sometimes when I’m drifting off I can almost see it. The thing I’m not supposed to know. It’s right there, just behind my eyes. A door. A room. Someone’s face.
But then it’s gone again. Just breath and pulse and these four green walls. And the question hanging in the air like smoke. What’s your favourite place. What’s your favourite place. What’s your favourite place.
I don’t know. God help me, I don’t know anything anymore.
Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.
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