Time moved differently in the psych ward's garden – sticky and slow like honey dripping through August heat, the kind of suspended animation you usually only find in airport terminals at 3 AM or that weird hour between last call and sunrise. Daisy sat on a bench weathered to the color of old bones, watching other patients drift through their prescribed outdoor time like particles in a lava lamp. The nurses called it "therapeutic landscaping," but really it was just a bunch of scraggly plants doing their best to survive in LA smog, hemmed in by walls too high to climb.
The garden itself was a study in well-intentioned failure, like someone had read about healing spaces in a magazine and then tried to recreate one with a Home Depot gift card and boundless optimism. Dead leaves collected in
