The Monastery of Lost NamesYour blog post

The Monastery of Lost Names

Days of Quiet

For a little while, I was happy.

The hospital smelled like lavender bleach and ghost cookies. They let me draw. They gave me socks. I talked to a therapist named June who asked questions gently and smiled like she remembered being a child once.

I told her about Vincent, my demon under the bridge.

She nodded. "It's good to have company down there."

I thought this was healing.

The First Evaluation

Then came the white-room interviews, three people whose names I could never pronounce. They wore identical glasses and spoke in perfect rectangles.

They asked:

• “Do symbols interfere with your logic?”

• “How many people live in your dreams?”

• “If God told you to eat your name, would you?”

I answered too poetically.

They scribbled in silence. One said, “We’ll try Pharmaceutical Realignment.”

I didn’t understand.

Experimental Compound: X3-FALL

They called it a “neurological solvent.” The idea was that belief systems, particularly religious ones, could be chemically unraveled, then reshaped.

It tasted like lemon and regret. Side effects:

• Sensory inversion (I tasted colors and smelled sounds)

• Persistent theological hallucinations

• Involuntary confession

I told June I had buried my second brother alive.

I don’t have a second brother.

Ice Baths: “Thermo-Cognitive Rebirth”

Two nurses wheeled me into a room lit by one flickering bulb.

They stripped me down. Cold metal scraped my back. The tub was dented, filled with water that hadn’t been water for days.

I dipped in slowly, but they didn’t wait.

One pressed my chest, the other poured ice into my lap. My breath broke.

Every nerve screamed liturgy. The cold entered my ears and rearranged the alphabet.

“Four minutes more,” someone whispered.

My vision became a cathedral of pain.

Electroconvulsive Theatre

They called it “sparking the soul.”

No anesthesia. Just leather straps and tears.

The machine sounded like guilt. I heard my dad’s voice echo from the electrodes:

“Monkeys are stronger when you take their names first.”

They turned it on.

I remember:

• My feet curled like dead leaves.

• I bit my tongue and tasted ancient hymns.

• The walls pulsed like judgment.

Afterward, I forgot my birthday and how to say “hope.”

The Evaluations Repeat

I kept asking to leave.

“Please,” I said. “I want to go outside. I need fog. I need sky.”

They’d smile like funeral directors.

“No,” they always said. “You must stay until you are well enough to live outside these walls.”

That sentence began to echo inside me. It folded time.

Well enough? I started to wonder, what happens if you never get well?

Billy’s Journal Fragment – Day 36

They say I’m improving. Yesterday I screamed for ten minutes without moving. They said it was "cognitive decluttering." Today they painted a window on the wall beside my bed. Just the frame and glass—nothing behind it. I asked what it meant. The doctor said, “That’s your goal.” I asked if the goal ever opens. They said, “Only when you're well enough.” I stared through it for four hours. It didn’t blink.