I look around again, thought by now I should've had my 12x12 room completely memorised. But I haven't, because I don't want to lull myself into any sort of false impression that I know this cell. I don't. Just the way I don't know the room I've had for ten years, or the house I've lived in all my life, or the school I attended - because there is no possible way that I can believe that these places can never again surprise me. When you know something, nothing about it surprises you. And everything that most people can claim to know about their lives are things that surprise me the most - all too frequently and not very pleasantly.
I am cowering in the darkest corner of this bare, harshly illuminated room - the darkest corner because the darkness is in my head, yet like a constant presence above me, a dark, threatening rain cloud that follows me around. The light is as bright on me as any other thing, yet I am surrounded by my personal rainy shield. My gaze sweeps the room erratically. Nothing yet. Nothing.
Yet things are never constant for me, not even rooms and furniture. Not the hard bed I sleep in every night, not the closet in the corner, and certainly not my thoughts, my words. My words.
My words that turned on me, made me something I still don't want to believe I am.
It all had started out innocently enough: my characters growing strongly in my head, breathing and living with me in a way that I cannot describe, and shouldn't have to describe to a writer. It is a point we all come to but never admit, for fear of people telling us what we already doubt. That's when we unconsciously push out own creations just a little bit farther away, to let them live on paper and nowhere else.
I didn't do that.
I saw nothing wrong with having actual conversations with the characters who were in my head and nowhere else. I thought I always knew what the difference between reality and fantasy was.
I was clearly wrong.
How can people I created end me here, this nowhere-land, this dead end to my life that I can never have seen coming? A padded wall as the cushioning blow: yes, honey, this is it, but at least you didn't hurt your head.
A movement in my peripheral vision catches my eye and pulls me away from my well-rolled-over recollections of a time that I was completely unaware of what I was doing to myself.
On my diaries. No, God, not my diaries. The neat stack of fifteen books or so shimmers slightly, and I hear them. I hear them telling me to free them, let them go. Let myself be something other than lonely. Completely, unchangeably alone.
Unchangeably, I remind them, blinking away burning tears. No illusions are going to change the fact that I am perfectly alone, and nothing else.
My therapist's words return to me: You're addicted to them. You created them, and you're addicted. Get over it. Addiction never lasts long - either you kill it or it kills you.
And the worst death is dying at the hands of something you've created.
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to tune out their whispers, rising like the early morning sun. A beautiful sight, yet a harmful glare if you look for too long.
I scream out in pain and despair as the longing to be with them - be with people who say what I want them to, do what I want them to, think what I want them to - the desperate longing eats away at me. The worst part is, they don't see them. They can't make these people, these people who are a figment of my dreams yet the essence of my nightmares, go away.
I plead to my diaries...let me go. I want to let you go. Free me, and I'll free you.
They laugh mercilessly, knowing that suddenly, I am at their mercy instead of it being the other way round.
Can't they see what they're doing? Have the forgotten that they exist because of me? Have they forgotten...
And I free fall into the optical illusion of my memories again, remembering the moments that somehow transformed my dreams into a living, breathing horror....