For Sarah

Tuscaloosa, Alabama - 1873

I had meant it when I promised to be good. Promised to follow the rules. Promised that I wouldn’t be so reckless. Promised that I would remember the consequences of not listening. The consequences not just for me, but for Sarah, for the family. I had promised with all my heart. Sworn to never again commit a sin that would send me back here.

Such promises flow quickly under the pressure of fear and of pain. Bryce Hospital is known for keeping skilled practitioners at applying such pressures. The promises they extract flow even quicker with the fear of a child facing a brutal reality without the gossamer cover of a parent’s protection for the first time. I was thirteen when my parents died a violent death of tuberculosis. It’s a miracle you survived the doctor said, even though it felt exactly opposite to me. If anything, it felt extremely unfair and downright wicked that I was somehow here while my kind parents had been cruelly, painfully taken.

It was because of my parents dying that I was shipped down to Tuscaloosa in the first place. I didn’t want to leave Boston, but my Aunt Evelyn and Uncle John had a farm that was doing well and they were willing to take me in. Out of the kindness of their heart, people would always say, you must be so grateful, and they’re such good Christians.

I didn’t feel grateful. I felt angry. I didn’t want their fancy education, upright manners, and rules for me to follow. I wanted the love of my parents back. Evelyn and John’s home was massive and full of exquisite decor, but it felt empty walking through it as a young woman trying to place myself amongst the statuettes and paintings.

In what felt like an increasingly dark time, the friendship that I developed with Sarah became my singular light. Wrapped in the innocence of childhood, we were everything to each other without realizing it. I just knew that I looked forward to seeing her at the schoolhouse and feeling an initially foreign fluttering in my chest that quickly became common but did not go away.

It was a quiet, everyday moment when we were walking next to each other, our hands occasionally touching but not quite making enough contact that I held on. I wanted to. Sarah’s hands were soft, just like her smile that day when she first kissed me. It would have taken me by surprise if I hadn’t been secretly wishing it while walking next to her. She stepped back from our kiss, still smiling. I wanted her to smile at me forever. I still miss her smile.

We were awkward children doing something that we knew would be forbidden. I didn’t fully comprehend what it meant that we were spending time together in this way, but it didn’t seem to matter that we didn’t know, couldn’t define it. She became everything to me, and we saw each other often. I was lost in a regular daydream of her affection and a comfort I hadn’t felt since leaving Boston.

The punishment when my Aunt and Uncle found out was swift.

God doesn’t approve of such behaviors, and Ethyl and John were certainly not folks to go against God, and especially not in such a way that would have the entire town talking.

It was easy enough for them to admit me at Bryce Hospital. Any guilt that I might have generously imagined they had would have been assuaged by a soft-spoken doctor and attractive nurse assuring them that they were doing the right thing, For Her Sake. I think it’s more likely they felt nothing at all.

I was forced to endure feeling physical sensations at an intensity I previously didn’t know was possible during my barrage of treatments at Bryce. Shock therapy, cold water therapy, heat therapy - these are only some of the many techniques that I was subjected to in order to ensure that I returned to my dear Aunt and Uncle without these dastardly proclivities.

My time in Bryce Hospital was confusing, painful, and isolating. I thought that I understood loneliness when my parents died, but that facility harbored an encompassing loneliness outside the bounds of what I could have imagined before experiencing it. It was nothing short of torture. To anyone who hasn’t been a patient at Bryce, it’s easy to blindly swallow the doctor’s line that it’s For the Sake of the Patient, or the Family. Those that have been ‘treated’ there parrot the same line too, but it’s with a weightiness of understanding that the others can’t possibly possess.

After the doctors eventually extracted from me the apologies and promises they wanted, I was brought to what felt like the brink of death and back so that I could act as an example. When they discharged me, it was as a reformed young woman, ready to re-enter society.

Aunt Evelyn and Uncle John liked to remind me how much I owe them. That it was their prayers and money that bought favor with god and the practitioners to deliver me home to them as a new woman.

Their influence was only able to quiet the rumors that I know swirl whenever I attended a social event. I know that I am a topic of conversation, the kind that comes up in hushed whispers behind half-closed doors. You know they say she’s doing well enough now one will say Yes, but how can you really know? another will scoff.

It was a month ago that Ethyl came to me, clearly proud of some social cunning she had contrived. What I hadn’t expected was my effective betrothal to what she assured me was an attractive young lad a few farms over. Nothing of course to do with the fact that our families business ventures aligned, and well it would certainly be convenient wouldn’t it.

I remember my vision narrowing and lungs gasping as the oxygen was surely being siphoned from the room. It was almost as if I was already back in Bryce, undergoing one of my treatment sessions. A premonition.

I was later told that I had fainted. The fainting spells continued, but between them I became vocal that a marriage was not something I would be engaging in. I refused to cooperate, rejecting the suffocating attempts by Ethyl and John to get me to listen to reason and accept reality. The Bryce Hospital doctors told Ethyl and John that I suffer from hysteria. That of course only they, armed with a significant stipend, will have a chance of curing me, if it can be done at all.

Walking through the sterile white corridor into the West wing of the building, I felt a familiarity that I despised. My heart thudded faster against my chest even as I tried to remind myself that this wasn’t a surprise. This time, I knew the consequences. Sometimes, speaking out is more important than self-preservation. Sometimes they’re even one in the same. Despite my promise - to the doctors, Aunt Evelyn, Uncle John, and myself - despite swearing that I wouldn’t see these walls again, I knew that I had made this inevitable.

Losing my connection with Sarah was devastating. But it is a privilege now to be untethered from the love of another that might keep me grounded. When the threat of loss is lifted, suddenly courage feels much closer.

My promise this time is different. Now, I promise that these walls will become familiar. In younger years, I thought that giving justice to the memory of what Sarah and I had was in reforming myself. I thought that I could give closure to her affection and absolution to my soul by falling in line, listening, obeying, becoming the good Christian girl I had believed I was until she changed me.

Now I know better. I can only be what I am, what I always was, even if that means I will be confined to Bryce the rest of my days. I wish I had been braver for Sarah then, but now I am brave for myself, and that will have to be enough.