Chelsea

Reality Is The Enemy

Germany, 1932

The blinding lights of the hospital were a stark contrast to the pitch-black night that blanketed Germany. It was around 1930 so the lobby had been quite vacant, save for a wealthy couple with a small girl. A light flickered in the corner, catching the interest of said small girl if only for a moment. She giggled and continued to swing her legs back and forth, barely scraping the ground with her shoes. The bright light seemed to illuminate her bleach blonde hair, almost making it appear to glow from a certain angle. Her steel blue eyes shot up at the man in white approaching them with a clipboard, closely watching his every move and making him quite uncomfortable. The doctor seemed quite on edge, but it wasn't the little girl and her condescending stare. He told her mother to wait with her in the lobby while he walked off with her father. Neither of the two men seemed happy. The doctor began discussing what the girl could only assume was whatever was written on that clipboard. She figured it must have been something really offensive, because he started screaming at the doctor with the reddest face she'd ever seen. She might have giggled, but this was scaring her a little bit. What was her father so angry about?

"No! My daughter does not have this...this disease!" yelled her father; his face reddening even after the young girl thought it couldn't possibly be any redder. She would have to catch him some extra birds to put him in a better mood. Then again bird corpses didn't always put them in a better mood, did they? She thought they were pretty thoughtful though. The doctor stammered on about the results of the tests that had been conducted on her a while earlier and what they meant. She had gone into a room where a doctor asked her some odd questions about things she was hearing. She thought it was completely normal to hear strange people talking inside of her head and never really considered that it might be a serious mental illness that would cause her and many others quite a bit of trouble for generations to come. The little girl watched with a hint of what could have been worry as her father continued to scream at the poor doctor with a continuously reddening face. However, his face stopped reddening when the doctor mumbled something to her father, something about a place called "America"? She listened in closer and overheard something about a cure being in America. A cure she assumed was for this disease she supposedly had, whatever that might have been. She didn't feel sick so why, she wondered, was she being treated as if she were?

Her mother and father each took hold of one of her hands- as was necessary because if they didn't she would most likely run off- and led her out of the hospital with eyes threatening to spill over with tears and a blissfully ignorant young girl between them.

Back at their decently sized house, the little girl curled up into a ball under her covers. There were people that talked to her at night, scary people, and the girl thought that maybe if she looked small they wouldn't notice her and maybe leave her alone for once. This was the exact opposite of the reality she, in time, would come to despise with a passion. She was often told by the strange people that 'reality was her enemy' however she never believed them. How could something that was her enemy possibly have flowers? The girl absolutely adored flowers, plants, and anything of the kind. Reality definitely wasn't her enemy if flowers existed. Reality is your enemy! What are you, stupid! These voices sure were persistent. She sighed. Maybe these went away with age? She could never be sure and feared she never would be. Listen to me! LISTEN! LISTEN! PAY ATTENTION! LOOK BEHIND YOU! She spun around as hastily as she could, her little heart pounding with fright even after she realized there was nothing there. The young blonde could have sworn she had hear growling, bubbling, or any other scary noise however it was so garbled she couldn't quite know for sure what it was. Diving back into the abyss of pillows, she began to quietly cry however this stopped as soon as she reminded herself that hearing things was normal, everybody else probably heard things, and that they would most likely go away eventually. The static and her tears still lingered however, whispering incoherently as static tends to do. The five year old blonde eventually let herself fall asleep besides the static's obvious disapproval, and dreamt of pleasant things like birds with broken necks and little flower crowns flying around her head. You see, she liked breaking bird necks because in her mind that was how she could make them happier. She would break their necks, and send them all up to birdie heaven. She often daydreamed about one day releasing every living thing on the planet into heaven, which was in her mind the only place that everyone got along because the recent political news had been making her very confused. Why were people like that? She had wondered and wondered and still couldn't seem to produce an answer with all the brainpower her five year old mind could gather up. That was another thing she feared she would never know the answer to. Maybe, she wondered, reality was in fact her enemy.