Notable Occasions on the Calendar of Dread

I sit back and welcome something I haven't welcomed in a while--laughter. The group of women in the home were sitting in a particularly uneven circle, talking and gossiping as if we had just entered high school.

Our loud noises were interrupted by one of the head nurses ushering on about our volume and how we had only a miniscule amount of time remaining before lights out.

"You're like a legend here, Jade," one of the girls sneered towards me.

"Yeah, you're the only patient I've ever heard of to escape a ward." another chimed in.

"They're hospitals, not prisons," I huffed back ignoring the rising anger in my chest.

"But still, you must have been scared out of your mind when you left!" the original instigator of the conversation said.

I clenched my fists and hid my white knuckles in my lap; ignoring their ever growing pestering about something that wasn't even my choice to begin with.

Fear of abandonment: that's what it boils down to. My father had left me at such a young age, only remaining in emotional and mental scars left in my being, he always sought after me as the middle child and "not being good enough", at least, for him. My younger brother was a scholar, interested in music and the science behind it, able to play any instrument you handed over to him. My older sister had an act for being a walking dictionary. She knew what nearly every word meant, every moment of the day. And then there was me: the emotional basket case who felt like she wasn't good enough compared to her siblings, driven madly into a botched suicide attempt only to end up in an american facility controlled by the copious amounts of money my father would throw at them.

When my parents divorced, I was too young to understand why my father wasn't a prince; I was too young to realize that "happily ever after" sometimes meant the abusive arguments they would have, their yells bleeding through my walls as I tried to force sleep upon my anxious being. The way my father used my mother into something she wasn't--making her out to be the bad one only to project his own insecurities from himself onto this shadow of a being. He broke her, and when she broke, I crumbled along with her.

Watching my grandmother become ill and suddenly die why I was away on a manifest vacation I didn't sign up for, all so I could be prodded and poked with every tool into my subconscious and picked apart by doctors that were the smallest meaning of the profession. My father tried to hard to distance me from a family he broke. I never saw him again as a knight in shining armour; never again saw him as someone who put the word "parent" into my head when their face appeared. To me, he was simply the vessel who put me onto this planet, doomed from my very contraception.

I never wanted anything more than to be accepted for whom I thought I was. Never wanted anything other than to be loved for the person I made myself out to be. When Genevieve came along (whether or not it was directly from Satan's lap), I brought my already broken being up on to something that I hoped would become great. How I begged to be liked by someone who didn't know my story. And she fell for it--fed directly on my pain and used that to her advantage. I went along with whatever she wanted and when I finally realized what fate had been dealt to me, it was too late--or so, I had thought.

See, my father remarried quickly, as if he needed something to distract from his wrong doings. He married a woman whom was just like him in ever sick and twisted way; her children coming closer to him than his birth children ever would. He alienated us and when we didn't come back, he went on without us.

That constant turmoil in the back of my head grew larger, darker, and deadlier within days. Screaming to be let out through the crimson blood that burst from the seams of my skin. It ached within the cracking of my bones, and filled itself when I finally filled myself with enough sleeping pills to numb a bear.

I never escaped "a prison" because I was never a prisoner to them, only to myself. Out of any other normal day I would not have done it, simply being so that the miniscule minute I was left alone with myself I tried again to leave this planet I was doomed from beginning life upon.

I found this all out in a matter of moments, and what messy scenarios followed suit was my subconscious trying to catch up with my broken being. I am back home now, far away from my father and his wrath, and I will never again be manipulated into something I think I need to become, all because I was too blind to see myself.

"The only time I was ever scared was when what I was doing to myself wasn't enough to stop my head from hurting. They always said self destruction is such a pretty little thing." I hummed back to them. They all look at me wide-eyed.

"You have no idea what it's like to be sick, because every one, and I mean every damn person on this earth is sick. We, just happened to get caught. And our captivity resulted into our minds being pulled apart into every little thing that could be deemed "unnatural". I didn't escape because I didn't want to be in the hospital any longer, I escaped because I knew seeing the real world would be better treatment than these nurses and doctors could ever hope to provide." I sneered, looking at every person's very astonished face and I peered from one to the next.

"And guess what?" I asked. "It worked."

Notes

Simply projecting my own being into this character. Love it or hate it.