Hysteria | Complete.

Epilogue

Sitting at the edge of my single bed, my bony fingers fumbled with the corner of my sleeve—a habit I had recently developed. My legs were dangling down the side of the bed and I was having a hard time controlling them from moving to and fro. I didn’t want to accidentally hit the nurse who had been checking my vitals for the past few minutes.

“All good. You’ve shown remarkable improvement, Gia.”

‘After all the mind drilling you guys put me through, wasn’t it inevitable?’

I wanted to scream this in her face yet I only nodded a bit in acknowledgment, my loose raven locks bouncing up and down with my bobbling head; they had lost their shine. My body was in a similar condition as well. I had lost weight. Deep dark circles were marring the skin around my eyes. My lips had become pale and chapped. The little amount of life that I had in me, left me the day Hysteria disappeared.

“Put your hand forward, Gia. I want to see you consuming these. Don’t fake it like last time.”

Smiling to myself, I let go of the cotton sleeve of my plain uniform, extending my palm in front of her—Martha. She was a nice, middle aged woman, working as a caregiver in this asylum for the previous two years, one year before my admission in here. She had two little girls, both a handful. That was all what she had told me, in hopes of striking a conversation, in hopes of getting something out of me yet she could never succeed. I never opened my mouth. I didn’t talk to anyone.

Fortunately, the man I had fatally injured was an infamous serial killer who had already killed two girls before me. My attempts at injuring him were considered as self-defense, but the little show I had put up in the town’s square along with my frantic state in the morning the teenage boy found me in the carnival didn’t really prove to be my in my favor. I was made to go through different psychiatrists, but I was unable to provide any valid reason for my actions. I couldn’t tell them why I was doing what I did. I couldn’t tell them how I ended up in there. Nothing.

In the end, it was decided for me to be put into a health care center; A fancy name for a mental asylum. My parents couldn’t do anything either. My mom only cried whenever she came to visit me because I kept repeating the same words again and again,

“Let me go. Hysteria is waiting for me.”

I caused a fair share of ruckus in the starting months, but I had gotten better with time. They tried their best to brainwash me, I couldn’t blame them, it was their job after all. There were long, long sessions of therapy, trying to make me believe that no Hysteria existed in the real world. It was all in my head.

Well, that’s what Hysteria does. You only know him as much as he decides to reveal himself to you.

Maybe I’d have ended up believing them eventually if I didn’t see a man with amber eyes standing in one corner of my room whenever I was creating a scene, tearing and throwing things, screaming as loud as my vocal cords allowed until a pair of nurses came in; to hold me down while one of them injected me with a tranquilizer. Each time, the last thing I saw before losing consciousness was his silently pleading eyes.

In those rare moments I got to see a glance of him, he didn’t have his face covered with ink markings like before. If it hadn’t been for those beautiful ambers, I wouldn’t have been able to recognize him. The beautiful pale man who stood in a corner of my room, didn’t talk to anyone, just stared.
After months of injections and pills filled with sedatives, I had succumbed to their will. I had confined my life to this room. I had stopped taking the only name that I used to call.

Hysteria.

“Come on, dear.”

Blinking back, I realized Martha had already placed the pills in my hand and was waiting for me to take my medication.