Grippy Sock Vacation

In the sterile, buzzing confinement of St. Luke’s psychiatric ward, Joey found himself donning the universally unflattering garb of vulnerability: a hospital gown and the eponymous grippy socks. It was July 2018, a timestamp of his life marred by the tumultuous breakup with Maria, a saga replete with infidelity, gaslighting, and a haunting dance with suicidal ideation. Checking himself into the hospital, Joey had been a desperate man seeking sanctuary, a place where his unraveling could pause, where he could say, “Keep me safe,” and expect an embrace, not a shrug.

The ward was a co-ed carousel of the broken, the healing, and the somewhere-in-between. The first few days were a blur of medicated stupors and cautious observations, until he met Time-Traveling Tom — a quiet man whose refusal to eat was not a silent scream for attention, but a preparation for a temporal leap. Joey, intrigued by the absurdity yet simplicity of Tom’s claim, found himself questioning reality, psychedelics, and whether sanity was just a spectrum where everyone’s dial was uniquely tuned.

Nurse Kunzler, a daily tormentor masquerading as a caregiver, turned consultations into condescension, belittling patients like Joey for not remembering details, for not owning their recovery the way she saw fit. Her office, shared and transparent, was a theater where vulnerabilities were critiqued rather than cradled.