My eyes are talking to me again. They draw lines on the walls that the paper shields I nailed on the cracked blue paint to protect me from their taunting faces. The beaded curtains hanging from above the window, short, long, short, long…they reach out like arms and caress my face when I sleep. I need to move the damn bed away from the wall, but I my arms are too thin, too pale. If I ask my parents, they’ll know what’s wrong with me. They’ll take me to that man again, with his thumb sized meds and phony, cool smile.
No, I tell myself. Maybe this time they’ll just help me. They won’t…they won’t notice. Sometimes they don’t notice. If I blast my music and lock the door, they can’t hear me talking to the mirror. They sometimes won’t notice when I segregate the food on my plate; the ones who laugh at me from the ones who listen to my thoughts. I don’t eat them; they would still live in me, whispering in my head at night.
No, no, no! Stop thinking like that. They’ll help. They’ll scoot the bed away from the window, shift the desk to its place against the wall. My stomach feels shattered, all of a sudden. They’ll see my computer! They’ll hack the account, they’ll go through my documents of fake words, go through my history, hack my email, my blog, they’ll yell at me, scream, throw things. Then they’ll yell at me for crying, like they always used to. They’ll tell me to grow up. You’re 16 years old, they say; stop acting like a goddamn child! Then, like usual, they’ll throw some more things. They’ll come to me the next morning: “Oh, baby, we’re sorry. You know we didn’t mean it, we just had a bit too much to drink.”
Our perfect neighbors will probably hear the yelling; these walls are too thin. The middle aged lady who lives there, the mother figure, she’ll pick up her phone with those nails and call the freaking police. I hate her nails; they look like a desert who is a victim of a snowstorm; fake, fake, fake. Have I mentioned I hate fake? Why can’t things just be real? My eyes show me enough fake already. My head tells me enough fake as it is. I don’t need the real to be the fake, too.
Just do it. Just do it! Just go ask. Deny all suggestions of going to the whitecoats. Deny all thoughts that aren’t normal, deny, deny, deny.
I ask them. They look at me with curious eyes. Why? they ask me, faces set. Just because, is all I tell them. Honestly, sweetie, why? Because! Now, honey… Nothing’s wrong with me, don’t give me those eyes!
The voices’ control is about to take over. “JUST F***ING FORGET IT! I’LL MOVE IT MYSELF!”
So I go upstairs, I gather all my power, I embed my uneven nails into the side of the bed, and I heave and I pull and I –
Oh, s***, I haven’t even moved. Sometimes this happens to me. My father figure has my arm; he’s looking at me weird. He asks me if I’m all right. The voices laugh at me; they tell me how incompetent I am. They tell me how ugly and unworthy I am; how ungrateful I am to be alive and how grateful THEY’D be if I were dead.
“GET THE HELL OUT OF MY HEAD!” I scream suddenly, rolling into a tiny ball on the floor. Kind of like those bugs under the rocks, the really tiny ones that are all eyeless and mouthless.
I hear my mother’s panicked voice. “Get the shot, John!”
My dad is frozen, still looking at me like I’ve gone crazy. Which is exactly the case, so I can’t blame him.
“JUST FORGET IT! I’LL DO IT MYSELF!” she screams at him. I wonder, sarcastically, for a second, where I get my personality from. The voices snicker at my reply; sarcasm is for idiots, they tell me.
Then there’s a quick pain in my arm, a rough arm beneath my neck, and the fuzzy ceiling begins to move. I feel myself laugh a little; they think because I’m unconscious the voices will go away. The laughter gets louder, fighting the darkness like a flame.
My mother brushes my hair from my face, soothes me. Soothing, my butt. They can’t understand because they don’t know.
The voices never leave me alone.