Parts Of Humans That Science Cannot Explain

• Gina Reye, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2015

I lie here, completely still and frozen. The sickening smell of terminally ill patients horrifically infects my mind. The doctor asks me to stick out my tongue and I am forced to do what I am told.
“Amie, you have been diagnosed with schizophrenia and it is our duty to place you on the required medication immediately.”
Schizophrenia.
I do not have schizophrenia. I could not believe what I was hearing.
My ears were ringing. I gaze over my right shoulder and try to ignore the sound of sobbing and whimpering coming from my mother and siblings. The doctor asks them: “Would you like her to go away to a secured facility for a few weeks until she improves?”
No, no, no. There is NOTHING to improve.
I do not have schizophrenia. I’m just a 15 year old girl who sees things differently from everybody else.
I do not have a sense of mental fragmentation. I’m not the one with the problem. We think we know everything these days, but we don’t. The problem with knowing everything is that we often forget what is worth remembering. And that’s what makes me different, what makes me unique. I remember what is worth remembering.
I ask my doctor, “Do you believe in love?”
He chuckles.
“Do you remember snow white? Can you imagine unicorns and fairies and princesses all falling in love? Do you dream?”
“I have a day job, and I have too much work to do and too much on my mind to have time for stupid fantasies that don’t exist. This is reality honey.”
I can see the hopelessness in his eyes. He diagnosed me with schizophrenia yet he can’t even accept love.
1 month passes and I am sitting here in the sanitary infested hospital bed feeling the same way I did exactly one month ago. I am getting punished for being creative. I am getting diagnosed for being imaginative, yet the people who diagnose me don’t even have time to be humane to others. Can’t even say a simple please or thank you because our computers are taking over our daily routines. Can’t even accept love.
Society is gradually disintegrating before our very eyes and nobody except the “terminally ill” seems to acknowledging it. I don’t want to be locked away anymore; I want to live the life that everybody is afraid to live.