I assessed where she was sat, scrutinizing her surroundings my eyes flickering from her face to the wall so as not to make her feel uncomfortable as she looked down, avoiding my gaze. The walls of the room were painted a greying white, the small window set high into one wall was barred, the bright sunlight outside trying but failing to penetrate the room to where we were sitting. The conditions, I remember thinking, did not seem conducive to a healing.

So we sat in artificial light on plastic chairs, talking. We spoke about the other patients and the nurses on the ward whom she had just met and liked. We spoke about all the people she did not like also. Countless reasons for her displeasure were stated, none seemed valid or justified to me though to her, in the microcosm of the hospital, they were all encompassing.

I brought her some magazines, trashy ones we used to enjoy reading together and laughing at when she was still in school. She smiled when I described some of the ridiculous articles she could read but her gaze soon returned to her knees as she explained how she was no longer allowed to use her reading glasses because she had snapped the lenses in half and used them to cut herself. By this point I was numb to the self-harm. The thoughts that stung were for the wasted life she was living, having dropped out of school, wasting her keen intelligence.

She asked if I wanted to play pool in their recreation area. I agreed, I had wanted to escape the grey room since I had arrived. We walked through the door into another larger room painted saccharine yellow. The colour almost mocked the pallid complexions of the gaunt young anorexia sufferers and the black moods of the depressed occupants. I did not ask to see her room. I found it hard enough to imagine her sleeping away from her own bed, the same one we had sat on to gossip about school friends and watch movies. I remember her being pleased that they had allowed her to paint the room a colour of her choice but this only worried me; they clearly expected her to stay here a while longer and wanted her to feel at home.

When visiting time was over I was more than ready to leave. I wanted to escape from the yellow room, from all the pale, damaged young people, from my best friend who was no longer the same. I felt awful — so guilty that I could escape and she could not and so guilty that I wanted to.

I knew I would return to the ward, but only through duty. I would return because of a memory of the friend I once had and through the hope that she would, perhaps someday, return to me.