| OCR Text |
Show 135 I'm sitting outside, in the garden. Starting over. I don't want to talk about the past. I don't want to think about my mother. I'm beginning again, here, in the present. Vm sitting outside in the_ garden. Me, Jennifer Voit, no middle name that I know of, nineteen years old, sitting here in the flesh, because of my flesh, here under the sun according to doctor's orders, my back sticky against the canvas of this chair. Forty-nine cent notebook on my lap, "My Journal" printed on its cover. Large paper cup full of crushed ice and Pepsi on this little table beside me. It's late summer. I'm wearing a bikini, a very skimpy little blue thing, so that the sun has maximum access to me. The sun is my treatment. I don't know why they bother to call it a garden. It's all concrete except for the tiny patch of grass in the middle and five undernourished shrubs growing up out of five square concrete planters. The fountain doesn't work. And if I want to see the sky I have to look straight up-I'm surrounded by four brick hospital walls. I'm not alone out here; I share the sun with three other patients. Two are old women sitting stiffly on a single concrete bench as if they're waiting together for a bus. With their splotchy look-alike skin they could be sisters. The other is that guy Owen, whose last name I don't know and don't want to. He's sitting across the grass with his shirt off, reading some cheap men's magazine, the kind that are filled with naked women. And every so often I catch |
