Paper Doll

Chapter Thirty-Two | Leigh

I lay on the bed Dr. Jackson offered to me. He said that this would be our last session before my final evaluation. I wanted to pass this. I wanted to hear that I would get released.

         "How's your day been?" he asked.

         "All the same."

         "And what does all the same mean?"

         "I get up, eat, take a bath, stare at nothing, talk to you, talk to Genevieve, talk to Thomas, talk to no one. Think of something else... something positive and then I'll fall asleep. When I wake up, it's time for lunch then it's a cycle. What I do in the morning, is what I do in the afternoon as well." I omitted the part where I thought of killing myself again. That wasn't a happy thought and that would mean I was back to scale one. So I wouldn't admit that.

          "How do you feel doing those activities?"

          I swallowed the lump in my throat. "I feel nothing," I said, almost a whisper. "I feel like I'm just doing it to pass up the day and then I'll get to bed for the night and wait until sleep has taken over me. There are times when I can't actually sleep. So I'd get my sketch pad and draw. I'd draw the garden. The picture of the garden is so familiar in my head I don't have to be in it to draw it. It's in the sketch pad beside you actually. If you want to take a look, you can. But I warn you, it's a different view of the same garden."

           So I waited. I saw in my peripheral vision that he picked up my sketch up and scrolled through it. There were moments he'd scrunch his forehead, showing the wrinkles on it. I saw him cringed at the view of the others. And then there's a small smile after the end. Then he put it back down.

            "Your sketches are good," he said.

            I smiled. "Those weren't really good, are they? Just the last one."

             "They were good. It's just that, how do you see them like that? Like what you said, they're from a similar garden but they have different emotions. They were like picked up from different people."

              Different people, huh. Like what I actually was inside.

             "I don't know. The only thing I know is every sketch in there corresponds to what I feel for every night I drew them. Like the first one, it was dark. No clouds, no stars. The flowers are dead and the leaves are all dried up. That's the night we found out our parents died in a car crash."

             "You still remember your parents' death?"

              "Always," I whispered.

             I got the stuff toy and stared it, raising it mid-air. It was my favorite. My mom gave this to me on my fifteenth birthday. Grace got a headband as she requested. We may be twins but whenever our parents give us a gift, they would ask us what we wanted. They didn't close us to the common knowledge for twins for having the same thing but of different color only.