"Didn't she smile at you? I told her that she was beautiful and she totally ignored me!"

"Ha, shut the f* k up, maybe she's shy. You're gonna scare her, you d*ke."

"Yeah, shut up!"

The girls quickly shifted their eyes away from my seat by the door and focused on the television. I don't know wether they actually enjoyed the cartoon or not, I just remember wishing that it was Tom & Jerry instead.

Ah, perhaps the hospital wasn't allowed to show violent things?

The reception was similar to a scouts' meetup. No one introduced me, and I didn't care to introduce myself. The girls were all dressed in pajamas with some still wiping their hair with tiny white hand towels and others getting up every now and then to refill a palm-sized styrofoam cup of water. 

Those cups made me quite uncomfortable: they weren't biodegradable. Rather, they were more likely to end up in an unidentifiable sea creature's stomach than a so-called recycling plant. How do I know? I don't. I'm just that naturally brilliant.

I can't say much else of my first night there. I was already put off from having to be in the same room as so many strangers, many of whom were taller than myself. This is an important thing to say because I happen to hate people who are taller than myself -- as someone who stopped growing from the moment they reached 153 centimeters, you can imagine just how ambitious my hatred is.

Another lady came out for a closing evening introduction and soon after urged the girls back into their rooms. With everybody up and standing, I felt the need to emphasize my hatred of taller people once again. Please share my hatred in this moment.

There were two other girls in my room, both a little puffy-eyed and listless. They walked as though in a daze and sat on their beds, taking turns to use the bathroom. I think that one of them had tried to extend their greetings to me, but seeing as they were clearly not in the mood, I again didn't respond. Meeting new people at night is inauspicious, after all.

According to what? Some kind of religion, probably.

While the two girls buried themselves into their respective beds, I made my bed with the lights turned off, a glowing strip extending from the open door. The sheets were not like the hospital's glaring white beds but a pale yellow. The blanket was thin but not unreasonably so, but I recalled the heavy emergency blanket that I was provided with when I was placed on the stretcher.

I looked out into the corridor and saw that it was still there, lying abandoned on the stretcher.

Ah, it looked so lonely. Good thing I remembered it, hum!

That lovely blanket felt as though it had softened due to continuous cycles in the washing machine and could wrap around my entire body enough times to suffocate myself. This, I realized, might have been the reason why all the sheets were light and short. Thinking further, I recalled having seen a documentary on prisons where some inmates would hang themselves or those who annoyed them using their blankets. 

With that thought, I laid on my bed with my hands on my stomach and slept the night away.

...as if.

A girl was knocking her head on the wall next to our room. Somehow, she was able to do so soft enough to avoid the caretakers' notice but loud enough for us in the next room to know that it was her head she was abusing. 

Strangely, the hollow thumping wasn't that disruptive in the night. Almost like the ticking of a clock.

But that wasn't the reason why I didn't sleep.