Back in my time manners were everything, even more so if you were of money. Father was full of his riches, I don’t think he cared for much else, so content so long our name wasn’t ruined. Mother despised how I didn’t play with my dolls, said my mind too openly, and lacked some manners. They agreed I posed a threat to the name. As a young lady, about 14, they sent me to an Asylum, or as they called it “a private school” in hopes I’d learn to be more proper. I played I was an innocent, pretty, and intelligent girl, casted out by her own family. My main doctor, Dr. Hartley, and a few of the nurses thought my mind extraordinary. I described living with my family as loud, so many dreams I had to keep bottled. I was like a fish out of water, constantly choking under the sun, under them and their ancient ways of living.
My forever home was the Asylum. A big stone building like a castle, bricking in the crazy, the ones who dare to dream of more and minds that thought unusually wiser. I belonged with them. I loved the life so much, I ached to be there forever. Face the darkness to live in the light, young forever, beautiful. Am I crazy for finding and joining my one true love? It’s okay, darling, to get a little lost in madness, fall into it openly, and then everything will become still. We all become still in the end, I chose how. I’m Ruby Louisa Moore, the young lady who fell from the third floor.
Dr. Hartley lost his mind filled with grief and guilt because he believed over time, I’d eventually leave and have some civilized life. Grief and guilt are like sisters, when I was still again, I could feel his thoughts of failure, pulsing everywhere. I fed on inflicting the pain, getting in his head deeper and darker till he couldn’t take more. I made him understand. He faced the madness too and the first to join me. I had to have someone to talk to. The second was Old Lady Mary. She told me stories of how she had a daughter with so many responsibilities. A daughter whose mother, growing in age, she couldn’t look after. Old Lady Mary was a persnickety old women, with rage at just being in such a place. Her rage burned hotter the closer I walked to her. The last story she told, so beautiful, forgiving her daughter, telling more and more as though she found her peace. Her tears convinced her it was a dream and a better one awaited. Sorrow stilled her insanity. The last was a young, crippled boy, Georgie. His parents couldn’t afford the burden of having a crippled child. For being so young, he understood the burden he was, self loathing weighted his heart. I could feel his disparity, my own muscles ached; I was consumed by it. I wove in his mind that if he stepped out of his wheelchair and stumbled one last time, the pain that maddened his mind would get still. He walks joyous with me, filling our home with his youth.
We walk the empty halls of this old, carcass of a building. Vines like veins growing up the sides of stone; stone once gray now dark and decayed. We’re not without. We’re more free after facing the madness, with no more pain, no more troubles. The collection of us grows with the youthfully ignorant who visit the creepy, curious ruins of an Asylum, up on the hill.