Kate Gompert on the psych ward — "Kate Gompert stared at a point…"
Kate Gompert stared at a point over the man’s left shoulder. ‘I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. I was trying to kill myself. There’s a difference.’
Context
Three days after the O.D. that nearly killed her twice, Kate's first correction of the clinical frame, and the theme's razor line: self-harm and suicide are different acts with different logics. Everything she says for the next seven pages is an attempt to make the difference legible to someone whose chart has no field for it.