{"id":14597,"date":"2015-02-17T22:20:08","date_gmt":"2015-02-18T03:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gayfriendschat.com\/socialblog\/i-never-asked-his-name\/"},"modified":"2015-02-17T22:20:08","modified_gmt":"2015-02-18T03:20:08","slug":"i-never-asked-his-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gayfriendschat.com\/socialblog\/i-never-asked-his-name\/","title":{"rendered":"I Never Asked His Name"},"content":{"rendered":"

I Never Asked His Name<\/b>
\n\"2015-02-13-Diriye_Feb_3web_Final.jpg\"<\/a>
(Diriye Osman is photographed by Bahareh Hosseini)<\/small><\/p>\n

I spent the summer of 2004 in a secure psychiatric institution in London. I had experienced a horrific psychotic episode and as a result I stopped my studies and embarked on a leave of absence from university. Traumatized by the aural and visual hallucinations I was experiencing, I stopped speaking altogether. There were no beds at my local, low-security mental hospital so I was shipped off to an institution that was reserved for men<\/a> who had committed horrendous crimes, many of whom had to wear handcuffs when in the communal areas. Isolated and in a state of over-medicated stupefaction, I wandered up and down my assigned ward as though it were a desolate dreamscape, a subterranean enclave within my muddled mind. I watched in disengaged silence as grown men<\/a> were tackled to the ground, stripped and injected with tranquilizers as they howled for God. I watched in disengaged silence as poverty-stricken patients picked up cigarette butts from the ground and tried to light them up. I watched in disengaged silence as starving patients sprinted to join the daily lunch queue, desperate for food. I carefully parceled up my humanity and locked it up in the attic inside my head, hoping to be able to retrieve it in the future.<\/p>\n

I spent six months in that mental hospital, and during those six months I considered the fact that I might not survive this experience. For the first time in my life, I faced up to the fact that this was a fight I might not win. Up until then, I was so used to winning in the face of extraordinary circumstances that the realization that I might lose on this occasion turned me to stone.<\/p>\n

There were three men<\/a> sharing my hospital room with me and one of them was a teenager. At night this young man<\/a> made disturbing sounds: a sonic halfway-house between choking, drawing up phlegm and howling. Unable to sleep, I would sometimes go over to his bed to see if he was OK only to realize that he was dreaming and was not, as I feared, dying. In the morning I would see him eating his breakfast in the dining-room, quietly going about his day, his tinny stereo playing Adina Howard’s “Freak like Me” on loop. <\/p>\n

The only time this young man<\/a> would speak to me was when we were in the smoking room together and he needed to borrow a cigarette. I would always oblige but I did not want to make conversation. I didn’t ask him what his name was. I didn’t ask him what his life was like outside of the hospital. I didn’t ask him about his night terrors. I was afraid, in that callous way that ignorant people are afraid of difference, that his madness was contagious and incurable. I still harbored hopes that I would recover, and this young, vulnerable boy<\/a> whose mental illness manifested in giveaway physical markers, tics, was simply a minor signpost on the map of my journey to well-being.<\/p>\n

Many years later I was waiting for the bus, my completed dissertation in my bag. I was heading to university to hand it in and at the bus-stop decided to spark up a cigarette. A young man<\/a> with a familiar face walked up to me and shyly asked me for a cigarette. It was my former roommate from the mental hospital. He now walked with a lurch to his gait and his hands trembled. He was making the same feral sounds he used to make in his sleep but he was no longer asleep. I handed him four cigarettes to assuage my guilt. He smiled and thanked me. I asked if he remembered me. He shook his head.<\/p>\n

“We were in the same room in the hospital,” I said.<\/p>\n

“You were in the hospital?” he said, sizing me up. “Rah, you’re doing well. Where are you off to now?”<\/p>\n

“I have to go to uni to hand in my dissertation,” I said.<\/p>\n

“Congrats, man<\/a>. Boy done good. Rah!”<\/p>\n

My bus came into view and I said goodbye. As I got on the bus and sat down, the young man<\/a> smiled and waved at me. I waved back and wondered what his life would have been like if he had received the kind of support and opportunities I was lucky enough to have obtained. I wondered what would have happened if I had lost the will to survive my time in the mental hospital. I wondered if I too would have been standing on the street begging for cigarettes. I wondered if the young man<\/a> had a family. I wondered if he was happy. <\/p>\n

As I contemplated these things and secretly congratulated myself on a successful life, I realized that I didn’t even ask the young man<\/a> the most basic question: his name. <\/p>\n

Diriye Osman is the Polari Prize-winning author of ‘Fairytales for Lost Children (Team Angelica), a collection of acclaimed short stories about the LGBT Somali experience. You can purchase<\/em> Fairytales for Lost Children here<\/a>. You can connect with Diriye Osman via Tumblr<\/a>. <\/em> He will be performing at The Huddersfield Literature Festival<\/a>, The Polari Salon<\/a> and The London Short Story Festival<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

www.huffingtonpost.com\/diriye-osman\/i-never-asked-his-name_b_6677994.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I Never Asked His Name (Diriye Osman is photographed by Bahareh Hosseini) I spent the summer of 2004 in a secure psychiatric institution in London. I had experienced a horrific psychotic episode and as a result I stopped my studies and embarked on a leave of absence from university. Traumatized by the aural and visual … Continue reading I Never Asked His Name<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2466,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nI Never Asked His Name - GAYFRIENDSCHAT.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.gayfriendschat.com\/socialblog\/i-never-asked-his-name\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I Never Asked His Name - GAYFRIENDSCHAT.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I Never Asked His Name (Diriye Osman is photographed by Bahareh Hosseini) I spent the summer of 2004 in a secure psychiatric institution in London. 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