⌂ Ridley Secare // Capitol ⌂

"Uh, excuse me. I would like my son to be admitted here."

"Ah, of course. Please fill out this form please and we’ll see about your son finding a room."

Demens’ State Hospital
Admission Questionaire

Date? _March 28_
Name? _Ridley Secare_
Residence (District/area)? _District 4_
Date of Birth? _March 19_
Place of Birth (District/area)? _District 4_
Marital status _Single_
Children? _No_
Occupation? _None_
Education (academic or common school, read or write) or none? _Common School_
Have any ancestors been insane, hysterical, or had convulsions? If so, state what ancestors, whether paternal or maternal, and what was the nature of their condition?
_Yes, his uncle and grandfather on his father's side. They were found to have Tourette's syndrome._
Have any relatives been insane, deaf, dumb, blind, idiotic, epileptic, paralysed, or consumptive? If so, state relationship. _No_
Was the patient ever addicted to intoxicating drinks, opium, chloral, bromides, tobacco, or any narcotic? _No_
Is the patient temperate in their eating and drinking, and in the use of intoxicating liquors? Have they always been so? _Yes_
Has the patient had a previous attack of mental disease? If so, give particulars. _Yes. He is currently diagnosed with Pica and Tourette's syndrome._
Did the attack or attacks come on suddenly, or slowly and gradually? _Both developed slowly._



"Here you are, is this everything I need to fill out?"

"Thank you, and yes, but your son is required to fill out what he is able to, you may fill in what he cannot. For now he is to fill in this form here."

Demens' State Hospital
Patient Information

Date _March 28_
Patient Name _Ridley Secare_
Male or Female _Male_
Birthday _March 19_
Age _12_
District/Area _District 4_
Marital Status _Single_
Occupation _None_
Chief Complaint _Twitching, and eating objects such as glass, nails and raw flour._
Present Illness _Tourette's syndrome and Pica_
Past History _Developed both Tourette's and Pica at around the age of six._
Habits _Normal, aside from those affected by his illnesses._
Serious Injuries _He was hospitalized for swallowing a nail on a couple occasions._
Operations _Yes_
Spouse or parent’s name _Victoria Secare_
Person to contact in case of emergency _Derrien or Victoria Secare, District 4_
Additional Data _His tics are eye-blinking, right eyelid twitches when he is annoyed or frustrated. And he also has times when his hands jerk, especially when he's nervous. He also has a stutter, made worse by his Tourette's. Because of his Pica he commonly tries to eat glass, raw flour and baking powder, spoons and occasionally nails._
Signature of Patient _Ridley Secare_
Signature of spouse or parent VictoriaSecare



"I believe we have filled this out as well as we could."

"Ah, thank you. Please wait a moment while I see about getting your son a room."


My name is Ridley Secare. And my mom abandoned me.

Ridley Secare

My birthday is March nineteenth, and it has been seventeen years since my mother gave birth to me. And about five since she abandoned me. I don't understand her reasons, and I probably never will. I just hope they were good ones, because if they weren't then I hope she feels guilty for her entire life. She may be my mother, but I don't love her anymore. Sorry, my mother is just a bit of a sore spot for me and I'd rather not talk about her. I may as well talk about myself then, for lack of better things to do.

Watch your mouth Oh, oh, oh
Because your speech is slurred enough
That you just might swallow your tongue
I'm sure you'd want, want to give up the ghost
With just a little more poise than that

I stand at an approximate height of five feet, ten inches. It's an average height for a boy of my age, and it's not as though being tall would help me any. Not to mention changing it involves painful processes, or high heels. Those seem to be one in the same though. My weight is a little on the light side, but it's what happens after living in such poor conditions for almost five years, with one meal a day, two if we're lucky. Last time I weighed myself I was about 138 lbs or something like that. Yeah, a little skinny for a guy my height but it's not like I have much I can do about it. I'm not the scrawniest person here, though, those who have been here longer are much skinnier than I am.

My hair is black, dark as the eternal depths of the oceans I used to sail with my father. My parents never let me swim in anything deeper than a kiddie pool, so we all know how swimming in it would go. My eyes are the beautiful sea green of the shallow waters to the more southern end of District four. Places so much warmer than the northern areas. They can look green, or blue, or look like the colour they actually are. I find them to be one of my better features. One thing about my eyes that people find weird is how often I blink. I can't help it though, my eyes just get dry if I don't. I hate when they get uncomfortable so I have to blink a lot, about twice as much a figure, maybe even thrice as much if it's a really dry day. When I get annoyed or frustrated my right eyelid twitches, and it just bugs me more so a wonderful vicious cycle there.

I've heard the nurses call them my "tics", which I suppose has something to do with the reason why I'm here. And perhaps it's what that Tourette's syndrome makes me do. Sometimes, when I'm nervous or startled, my hands jerk. It's not even just a clench or a pause I mean they jerk. It means that I drop just about anything that's in my hands at the time. It's annoying. Yep, you guessed it, that sets my eyelid twitching.

I'm lucky to have more than two sets of clothes. I actually have three. Two different jackets, three different shirts, two pairs of jeans, three pairs of socks, one pair of shoes, and a scarf. I'm only allowed to have one jacket in my room at a time, the other one is in a locked box in the "stuff room" as we call it. I think the nurses call it the "storage locker". My scarf is there as well, and I can only wear it when I'm out of my room. I get to have two shirts with me in my room, though, one under my mattress to try and keep it from being too wrinkled, and one on my back. Same thing for the jeans and socks. My shoes are either on my feet or beside my bed. They don't have laces on them, being slip-on. I know of one guy who has Velcro.

Or was it God who chokes in these situations
Running late? No, no, he called in
Or was it God who chokes in these situations
Running late? No, no, he called in

So I mentioned my Tourette's. It's not the terrible thing most people think it is. I'm only a little twitchy and I don't even have all that many symptoms. Well, I didn't mention my stutter, but that's only... when I speak. It's actually a pretty bad stutter, though it's better than it was when I was younger. Before, I could barely speak for it. Now I'm actually able to say a word or two without it coming out. Anything longer than that and it will show itself. I guess my Tourette's isn't making it any better, so I'm just glad people are actually able to understand me now.

Aside from my stutter, and my Tourette's I have actually been diagnosed with another "mental illness". At the age of seven I was told I had a syndrome known as Pica. Pica is an eating disorder where a person wants to eat things that are not normal to eat. I personally have a form of Pica known as Hyalophagia, which means I eat glass. I personally don't know how or why I started, I just know that I like the texture that it makes when I crunch it into a grit. I also like raw flour and baking powder, but that isn't as common. I have tried nails a couple times. That didn't end well. Aluminium foil was alright, but I didn't like it all that much.

My parents tried to get me to stop eating glass, and they probably did everything they could think of, but I never stopped. I still haven't. I actually have minor panic attacks if I'm unable to chew glass. I need to have it, like a morphling addict needs morphling. The texture soothes me, and I've gotten to the point where even the nurses have given in and let me have glass in my room. I have a bucket of it, all of the corners rounded so I can't cut myself unless I broke it. I never think about hurting myself with it, for all they think I might. I just need to chew it. I've developed a technique to chewing it so I don't cut myself. And my throat has become able to handle the gritty glass that I end up swallowing. The nurses try to convince me to just spit it out into the bucket instead of swallowing it, but I don't unless they are with me. The swallowing is almost as important as the chewing for me. The gritty texture in my throat is one of the things I really enjoy. Am I weirding you out? Sorry, just trying to explain myself.

When I was younger I used to steal flour and baking powder from the kitchen and take it to my room with a big spoon and just eat that. Then I'd chew on the spoon. Eventually my parents had to give me separate cutlery because I'd always chew it. They never let me have knives though, no surprise there. I've been doing it since I was seven so you can imagine how worn those spoons and forks were. If they could, they'd avoid even giving me forks, but it's tough to eat some things without forks. I mean, how do you eat fish with a spoon without smearing it just about everywhere?

The hospice is
A relaxing weekend getaway
Where you're a cut above all the rest
Sick and sad patients
On first name basis with all the top physicians

Now, I mentioned my eating nails before right? Well, in case you were wondering, I meant the iron nails, the ones you hit with a hammer to build stuff. I was never much of a fingernail biter, though I did try it at one point. Pica does strange things to your judgement of 'edible'. So, the nails, a little tough to chew but swallowing them was definitely interesting. That was probably one of my more stupid ideas, but I didn't realize at that point exactly what would happen. I was lucky that it had gone straight down my esophagus without getting stuck, but that's where my luck ended. It stuck itself into the side of my stomach and I had to be taken to the hospital. Two weeks and an operation later and I was back at home.

I knew then to stay away from the larger nails, but I thought the smaller ones would surely be alright. I managed to get a couple of those little nails, the ones used for tiny wooden boats that are only a couple millimeters thick and maybe an inch long. Those were easier to chew, but they were a big problem when I swallowed them. It had hardly been a month since my last trip to the hospital and I was already on my way back, this time with two little nails stuck in my esophagus. Because of those two operations I have two scars, and the knowledge to stay away from nails. The first scar is the larger of the two, and it's on my left side. It's about four inches in length and is a small ridge of skin. The second is a little shorter at three inches and smoother because they put more effort into making it less visible. It's still quite obvious, on the right-front side of my neck, but at least it's not too bad. No one here cares anyway.

I tried a pebble once, but I didn't even bother swallowing it. It didn't taste all that good and I didn't like the way it cracked against my teeth. I chipped my top right canine because of it, but it was better than having to get a third operation. My parents had locked away every nail in the house and never took me anywhere near a nail ever again. I had learned my lesson though, and I doubt I would ever forget it with these scars on me. Physical scars that couldn't compare to the ones left on my heart. Ones my own parents put there. More so my mother, but my father didn't exactly help me for all he didn't exactly hurt me.

My Tourette's caused me to a horrible Career, I couldn't hold a weapon for the life of me because the thought of fighting would make me nervous, and if you remember being nervous caused my hands to jerk and whatever weapon I had been given fell to the ground. My father understood a bit, I think, because of my uncle and grandfather, but my mother was always furious and disappointed. She would yell at me, and then she would turn on my father and blame him for the bad genes. I couldn't help how I was born, and if she wanted a son that could actually fight she could go have another kid. Again, I'm a little bitter about my mother. Even still, having another kid wouldn't have hurt me as much as getting rid of me. For all I know, she did have another kid. I wouldn't be surprised if she left my father or just slept with some other guy. My mother is a bitch like that.

Prescribed pills
To offset the shakes
To offset the pills
You know you should take
It a day at a time

I grew up in District four, the District of water and fish. I didn't mind the fish, but I loved the water. I would have loved to swim constantly, but like I said before my parents had some crazy notion that I would drown because of my Tourette's or something. So instead my father would take me sailing in his little 20 footer and we'd go up and down the coast for a whole day. I loved it, and I would stand as far to the point of the bow as I could so the wind would blow around me and I would breathe in the salty air. It was lazy days like that which kept me strong even when my mother got upset at me for the small things I couldn't help. She completely freaked out on me when I ate the flour for the first time, and then the next time she just hit me. It wasn't enough to stop me, though, and it wasn't like she hit me hard.

She gave up about the flour, and didn't do much more than yell at me for the baking powder. The spoons and forks she passed off as just part of growing up, and did nothing more than separate a group of forks and spoons my sole use. When it came time for me to start my Career training, she pressed me to work and work fast. Sadly, I had a hard time with it as it was, and her pressuring only made it worse. It wasn't until I was forced to start training with others that I really failed. I was put up against a boy one year younger than me, but who was probably better than I was, and given a sword. I could barely use a knife to a degree good enough to cause damage to a dummy, but a sword against a live opponent. Nope, that was a recipe for disaster.

And as everyone expected I was beat in a couple seconds. One lunge from the boy sent a wave of fear through me, and my sword clattered to the floor. My trainer didn't even bother telling me I could do better, and told my mother there was no hope for me. I wanted to say that I agreed with him, and that I didn't see the point of continuing but my mother wouldn't have listened to me anyway. Sure enough, the next day I was back to training. Thankfully, I was back to working alone and with only a knife but I still was horrible. I suppose it didn't help that aside from training I had never held a knife in my life, but my mother never thought of that and I didn't really care.

So I trained, or failed at training, until I was almost twelve. The beginning of March, my birth month if you remember, she stopped my training and seemingly stopped caring about me. I had no idea what the sudden change was and I didn't want to ask. My father was away, on a long fishing trip with a friend. He wouldn't be back until the end of March, and he had already given me my birthday present from him and his happy birthday wishes. I was a little bitter that he wouldn't be home for it, but his present would tide me over until he got back.

That's when you stu-stu-stutter something profound
To the support on the line
And with the way you've been talking
Every word gets you a step closer to hell

Except my mother had other plans. Two days before my father came home she took me on a trip, it seemed it had taken her nearly three months to arrange it and it wasn't surprising why. We got on one of the trains like the tributes traveled on, the ones that went an average of 250 miles an hour and would get us to the Capitol, which was her intended destination, in less than a day. We arrived at the Capitol in the late afternoon, and instantly we went through a check making sure we were here with permission and that everything was in order. Having only seen the Capitol on the television I wasn't expecting the grand place that I walked through while my mother dragged me along by the scarf my father had just given me.

We arrived at a massive brick building, it was two stories high and who knew to what length it stretched. I saw a clock tower near the center of the property but didn't think much of it, except that my hands were jerking to the time of each of its ticks. Entering the building was only done with the help of my mother and my unwillingness to be choked to death by my own scarf. The entrance looked nice, lovely velvet couches and chairs everywhere, nurses wearing palest pink and white outfits while doctors walked around in white coats and blue or green or gray shirts. A stern-looking woman with a clipboard and wearing a light blue dress with a black belt and black tie in her hair came over to us. You know the story from before.

With all of the forms filled and signed I now no longer belonged to my mother, but to the lady and the people of this building. My heart wasn't exactly broken by the traitorous happenings, but I would be lying if I said I didn't feel anything. Other than an overwhelming panic that sent my hands to jerking like a leaf in a tornado. A nurse came over at the beckons of the woman, and told me they would take me to my room. I followed her down the hall, clutching the small bag my mother had let me pack as the only tie to my life now. I felt like I was walking into the gates of hell. Certainly it seemed like that as we went further down. The place was not nearly so nice, and not nearly so comfortable. I sensed a regret about the nurse but I said nothing, just followed with wide eyes and shaking hands.

I caught a look at the last sign we past before she stopped. "Loomis Wing" it read. The nurse opened the door to what looked more like a cell than a room and gestured me inside. Cautious, I wandered over to the opening and was caught off guard as she pushed me in and shut the door. The slam rang through my head and caught in my throat. I knew then I was trapped, and that my mother had not only abandoned me but signed my life away.

I am alone in this bed, house, and head
And she never fixes this but at least she...
I am alone, in this bedroom
She never fixes this but at least she...

I didn't know how long I had been in there for, only that it was way longer than I was used to without glass or flour to chew on and I was panicking, but eventually the door opened a crack and a bowl of... something was pushed in. The door was shut again and I was left to wonder what was going on. I went over to the bowl, eyeing it in hopes it might be glass or at least porcelain. Thankfully it was the latter, so I could crunch that after I ate... whatever it was that was in there. Looked a little like sloppy porridge, but I wasn't exactly thrilled to see it. And wonderfully, there was also a spoon in it. At least I would have the spoon once I had finished the slop and the porcelain.

With my eyes closed, and the memory of flour on my tongue I was able to get through the slop by pretending it was wet flour. For all that it did for me, it may as well have been. Licking the last of it off of my lips I brought the bowl to my mouth, taking a small bite of the edge as a test for taste. Aside from tasting like the slop residue that was left on it, it wasn't that bad. I preferred glass over it, but I didn't have many options right now. Taking a larger crunch of it, I began to eat the bowl, leaving the spoon on my lap as I sat on the floor. Relief filled me with each time I crushed the porcelain into smaller and smaller pieces. Eventually I was left with only the spoon, and a much relieved mind.

Absentmindedly, I stuck the spoon in my mouth and ground into it a bit with my teeth. Standing up with it still between my teeth I went to have a look around now that I was more sane. A door, a metal bed with a shabby mattress and my little bag of clothes were all I had here. Just as I was about to sit on the bed and pull out my clothes the door opened. I caught a glimpse of two guards behind the sweet looking nurse who entered. She told me that this was no longer my room, and that I was to go with her to switch to another one. Then she looked around as though searching for something, confused as she obviously didn't find it. She muttered something about a bowl, then paused. I guess she must've realized that I had Pica. Giving me what seemed like an attempt at a knowing look, she ushered me out the door, snagging my bag before I could grab it.

She drove me down the corridor in what I thought was the way back to where I had come from. For a moment I thought I might be getting out of here, but no such luck. In the next wing, titled "Legume Wing" by an overhead sign, she opened a door and pointed inside. I went, knowing I had no other option, and she riffled through my bag to produced the clothes I had brought. She took my scarf from me, and only allowed me to keep the jeans, socks and shirts I had brought. My second jacket, scarf and bag left with her. The slam of the door signaled I was once again trapped. At least she hadn't taken my spoon.

Prescribed pills
To offset the shakes
To offset the pills
You know you should take
It a day at a time

Part of Mania And Melancholy plot.

FC: Ian Harding

Lyrics: Nails For Breakfast, Tacks For Snacks by Panic! At The Disco

Words
423 - Forms
102 - Introduction
541 - Appearance
1159 - Personality
1662 - History
3883 - Total

odair

The hospice is
A relaxing weekend getaway
Where you're a cut above all the rest
Sick and sad patients
On first name basis with all the top physicians