Running in Place

Perhaps it is poetic justice that I have such trouble describing Annalise. When we first met, she was testing out adjectives — boo face, poor face, boo hoo face — yet none of them seemed to fit. Vascular dementia had erased the word “sad” from Annalise’s vocabulary, and I stood in silence as she floundered for an alternative. Something prevented me from finishing her sentence.

Although I had been miming the role of a psychiatrist for weeks, it was not diagnostic objectivity that kept me from reviving our stalled conversation. As her frustration filled the room, a far more selfish impulse held my tongue: curiosity. I wanted to hear the vocabulary that Annalise’s mind, out of desperation, would invent.

It is not so difficult to understand why the mentally ill, throughout Western history, have been heralded as visionaries, prophets, and poets. If divine beings do not answer humans plainly, perhaps divine truths hide in ambiguous speech. Or, as Annalise taught me during our first exchange, even the slightest hope for profundity can have a dramatic effect on why, and to what, we listen. I was enchanted by dysfunction, and regardless of the patient’s distress, I did not want to repair it. Is there no place, then, for lyricism in the Psychiatric Unit? Is aphasia never beautiful? Should novel adjectives just be signs of dementia? To the extent that linguistic analysis interferes with patient care, it seems that these are the only responsible conclusions. Love the poet, hate the poem. Like most of my favorite paradigms, this one worked perfectly until it was proven wrong.

One afternoon in the hospital, Annalise was feeling restless and started yelling, “I want to run away.” When the attending psychiatrist asked, “Where would you run to?” Annalise paused for a moment and then replied, “Where I am.” Again I found myself speechless, but this time not because I was waiting for something more. Rather, I was floored by the poignancy of Annalise’s comment. This was a woman displaced from herself, wanting to run to her “I.” For Annalise, quite literally, life was elsewhere. “Where I am” was more than just the wry wink of a damaged brain; the phrase exemplified communication at its purest. It let me witness the world, for a single second, through Annalise’s eyes.

Since that afternoon, I have teased out many other meanings of “Where I am.” Maybe Annalise meant that she sought help in the hospital, but that it was not enough. Maybe she was trying to ask, “Where am I?” Maybe there are inexhaustible interpretations, and, despite Annalise’s penetrating words, we never made contact at all? To me she has become J. Alfred Prufrock, hiding behind language, repeating, “That is not what I meant, at all.” I will never be able to pin down Annalise’s true intention. In the end, all I really know is that she tried to say something. That, it seems, is the root of our connection.

I see myself in Annalise, someone trying to bend language to do an impossible task: to communicate experience. My feeling of empathy, as Annalise spoke, was nothing more than the birth of an analogy. I wish I could find a better way to say it, but my tongue is still stumbling, in concentric knots, toward the perfect words.