Black collars and red doors.

You admit yourself into the psych ward two days before Thanksgiving. Your mother drives you, after an argument-turned-tearful-moment at one in the morning and seven hours of fitful sleep. They take your blood pressure no less than three times, ask questions you mostly don't know the answer to, and then there's lots of waiting between this nurse, that consultant, and the other doctor.

You fall asleep on the emergency room bed, fully dressed with your boots on. When they come in to take your blood pressure again, you have a fast moment of vertigo.

For a second, just a second, you thought you were asleep on the Ramapo Health Center floor, the Ramaplague 2.0 kicking your sorry, sleepless ass, your favorite camper whining your name in your ear. Stomach flu or no stomach flu, in that moment, you were happy. You knew who you needed, and who needed you.

- - -

One of the people you talk to that morning asks you what your stressors are. You stare at her blankly for a second. My whole if is a stressor, you think.

“She dropped out of college,” your mother replies helpfully after a few seconds of silence.

“So you're feeling... abandoned?” the woman asks. You must have mentioned your long-distance boyfriend, the camp friends no closer than 300 miles away, the friends in Chicago who graduated. The idea that everyone is gone, gone, gone, gone.

The quizzical look you give her is real. “Why would I feel abandoned?” you ask. “I'm the one who left.”

- - -

When you go up to Station 20, which is where you will spend the next 24 hours, they make you change into burnt orange scrubs that are the same color as your ex-boyfriend's old car. Most of the things you brought with you, you cannot keep. Your journal has a spiral wire binding. Your Fair to Midland sweatshirt has a drawstring. Your belt is a potential weapon. They don't make you take your rings off, which is nice, especially since you don't think you could take out all of the ones in your hair.

You're almost ready to leave, brushing a stray dreadlock or two back with your left hand, when the nurse notices the black double band around your left wrist.

“Is that a belt?” she asks you.

You unbuckle it and hold it out to her. “It's a—” You choke on the word collar, as if mentioning your sex life—your kinky, happy, comfortable and currently-on-hold sex life—in this place is somehow unholy. Or maybe you're just not ready to try and explain a black nylon dog collar to this nurse. You're hoping that holding it out to her, unbuckled, will let her see that it's already cinched as tightly as you can get it, and it can't be a danger to anyone—especially since you've worn it exactly like this on your left wrist for the better parts of the past year and a half. Wearing it around your neck without Lynx around would be uncomfortable, unnatural.

But you don't say any of that, and she takes it from your hand cool as you please. Well, you think with a slow and sinking sense of inevitability. I suppose it's better to take it off now. He'll be gone when I get back, anyway. I had a meltdown on him and his girlfriend, it's only a matter of time. You take your now-harmless clothes back and step out into the unit wearing your scrubs and the feeling that something crucial to you has sloughed away like dried glue from a five-year-old's fingers.

You couldn't have felt more naked if you stripped all over again.

- - -

You play too many games of chess with a boy with the same name as someone who once treated you like a commodity he'd earned. There are not enough black pieces. You play with some that are a gray a shade darker than his white pieces. This leads to confusion and makes your forehead furrow, but you still manage to stalemate him at least twice.

The games keep being interrupted by doctors, nurses, and consultants. They ask you the same things. The conversations gain a rhythm.

Why are you here?

I don't really know.

Do you feel like hurting yourself?

Not right now.

Do you feel like killing yourself?

Not anymore.

How can we help you?

I don't know.

Your father even comes to visit that evening. He asks you the same things. You give him the same answers. You try not to be angry when he hints that you haven't been looking hard enough for solutions, and he tries not to let you see him tearing up.

After he leaves, you sleep like the dead, waking up once during breakfast to shouts and yells that make you think, I do not have to take care of this. My job is not to control this behavior. Today, I am a camper.

The thought gives you comfort you haven't been able to find in months. There's nothing quite like understanding your role in a crisis, even if it's completely opposite than usual.

- - -

Your mother picks you up at noon. You turn your phone on when you walk in your front door, braced for the texts from your two best friends inquiring after your well-being. What you don't expect is the text from Lynx, from 6:17 pm, right around the time your father started playing with mismatched plastic chess pieces instead of looking you in the eye.

I miss you and I hope you're doing okay. ♥

You stare at it for a good ten minutes before you can even think about answering. You feel like you are an axis and your world just rotated around you like a secret door.

He did not leave you. Between the time you hung up on him in a hiccuping, hyperventilating panic, and the time he got on a plane that would take him away from the other woman he loves, he was thinking about you.

When you get up to your room, you buckle the collar back around your left wrist. The snap of its clasp feels like the click of machinery in fine working order. When you go out into the kitchen, you play Scrabble with your brother. A couple hours later, your best friend in the world comes over. You finish Lynx's Christmas present and she paints a red door in the fog.

“It's a sad picture,” she says by way of explanation. “But it can have a happy layer.”

“Do you like it?” you ask her.

“Yes.”

When she leaves, you sit for a while, thinking. You think perhaps you're the Short-Haired Tornado's red door. You think that all the things you've spent so long believing about why people stay with you might be wrong. For the first time since you found yourself in a hammock in the woods in upstate New York in the middle of July, you think you know something.

You think you know who you need, and who needs you.

And for the first time in a long time, you feel those things balance, like your weight in a hammock between two oak trees, or the pressure that pulls on the ring of your collar when it's clasped around your neck. Yes, it's nice to know your role, even when it's completely opposite than usual.

Sometimes you take care of others. Sometimes people take care of you.

The balance there is the part where you take care of yourself.