One barred window, reminding me that even though the landscape of Oak Hill is barren, discolored, and dead, that being outside and being able to frolic amongst the wiry tree branches, crisp fall air, and brown grass is a luxury that I’ll never receive.
Why?
Because I’ve been a bad, bad girl.
Disobedient.
Hostile.
“Bad girls get punished,” as Susan likes to put it.
She thinks I’m a plague, infecting the other patients with my virus of rebellion all because I bit her fingers the last three times she’s tried to force my meds down my throat. A new patient named Honalee who has a loud and annoying habit of barking at the other patients witnessed my transgression and repeated it. According to Aurora, she broke the skin and as tough as she appears to be, apparently Susan doesn’t like bloody fingers.
The stare-down she gave me after the Honalee incident made me feel like her eyes were the serrated knife and I was the block of cheddar cheese.
I’ll never forget the way her eyes reminded me of steel. Shiny, metal, and hard. And I’ll never forget the way they cut right through me.
Thanks to Honalee, I spent the next week in solitary confinement. And well, I’ve avoided her ever since.
To me that doesn’t matter. They can punish me. They can shoot me up and strap me down. They can strip away my dignity. They can torture me slowly. Suffocate the girl I used to be out of me in small doses.
It doesn’t matter.
What they do to me will never matter.
I won’t become the robot they want me to be.
I’d rather die.
I stand at the window with my hospital gown suctioned to my skin and shiver in silence as the cold bleeds through the thin panes of glass and washes over me. Damien’s voice cuts into my thoughts. “Come lie down with me, love.” This is a command, not a request and at the moment, I don’t feel like listening.
Instead, I continue staring out the window and pump warmth back into my arms before folding them across my chest.
I don’t want to lie down. I want to break free. And there’s a huge part of me that wants to bark out at him, “I thought you were supposed to save me.”
Save me. Save me. Save me.
He promised me so I begged for it.
Pleaded.
Hit my knees in a hysterical fit of madness and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed until my throat was raw and my voice was gone.
He didn’t listen to me.
Damien.
He didn’t seem to care.
I wept at his feet, full of love and sorrow and all I got from him was a smile and a hand through my matted down hair. It was a lifeless and cold gesture. On top of that, I know he’s the best kind of illusion and more than anything I wonder why I’m still seeing him.
I banished him from my thoughts.
Screamed at the top of my lungs for him to leave.
I held the door to my cell open and ushered him out with urgency.
It’s like my eyes and my mind are engaged in a wrestling match.