Emptiness

Prologue-Before: awake

Before

I was transferred to a menacing steel walled building on the night of my 16th Birthday.

Not exactly a teenager's idea of a "sweet 16", but when your mum finds you in the corner of your bedroom in a frozen state of shock , unable to piece together any words, portray any emotion from your eyes, then I guess it would kinda make sense.

The thing was, this had been happening for a while. It was an effect of incessant insomnia and (when I did sleep) recurring nightmares of a nameless, faceless, shadow of a monster catching up to me in a strange town, fuzzy at the edges so that I couldn't piece together where, and it dragging me underwater in a huge lake, the moment of being submerged playing over and over.

And the strange thing was-the craziest part of this twisted vision- was that I felt oddly calm as I was submerged.

There was a sense of serenity in me, a sense of acceptance.

But inevitably when I awoke the thrashing began, as did the screaming.

But somewhere in the corner of my mind, a horrible thought pulled on my consciousness, a thought that told me I was screaming because I had woken up: because the monsters had not succeeded. Because I was alive? Because I wanted them to succeed?

I wanted for them to tear apart my soul and make it theirs.

Constantly these thoughts have been penetrating the core of my mind like poison and I am at war, locked in by my mind.

I never wanted to be a monster, but clearly, my parents were frightened of me. What other possible explanation would there be for them hauling me to this creepy psycho building?

Where had the childhood innocence and complete obliviousness gone? Why couldn't I be six years old, my only worry about losing my most prized worn teddy bear? If that had been my only worry at six years old. Now, I wasn't so sure it was. I can't quite begin to comprehend when the deep anxiety started to fill my bones, but I know that everything escalated pretty quickly from there.

I do know that I was robbed of my childhood innocence long ago. Too young.

Of course it wasn't that my parents didn't love me, or the pills and the numerous therapists and psychiatrists weren't working, it was the voices-and the visions.

Although I can't and won't forgive my parents for letting them take away a significant part of a human's brain:

Memory.

The men told me I could keep one memory as if it was some 'consolation prize' for the emptiness they would bring.

The men with their white coats and haunting black eyes and the smell of rust and decay-the sensations that beat a pulse on my brain, my brain which was about to become black and white, stripped of colour and vitality, stripped of any trace of my existence.

The men with their splintering voices and hands made of sheets of ice. They spoke to me in their monotone voices, devote of any emotion, devote of any promise, any glimmer of hope, but full of inexplicable destruction and greed. They told me that it may take a while for me to regain the memory.

They made me erase the rest; they burned my clothes, books, my stories and secrets and turned my already black and decaying heart to ash, crushing my veins with the sensation of metal clamping down on me.

And I felt as if the very essence of life was seeping from my veins and it was hard to hold on. I forced my hazy eyes to focus on something as shock and fear coursed through the ice in my blood. I saw their many files strewn about on a grimy desk, no doubt about me and how I was a "hazard to myself and those around me". No doubt that was where the reason laid, the reason why they were taking such extreme measures with me.

The men left me while they took remnants of my life to burn them. I strained to take a look and nearly pulled my elbow out of its socket, white hot pain shooting through my arm, but I grit my teeth and finally, reluctantly, my vision started to clear just enough so that I could train my mind to be empty and full of nothing. As usual. This was now a reflex; this I had done so many times before to block out feeling. And as the men came back and loomed over me, I was drenched by the inescapable fear of what they were about to do. I had been told I was going to have the "procedure". If you're in the dark place I was in you too wouldn't like the sound of that word.

It sent shivers down the rickety ladder of my fragile cracked spine.

But now there was no escape: they pinned me down, setting me alight with dread as they rammed their wires and machines in to me: the wires and machines that would be the end of the existence I had known. The main one, leader, with eyes all black and no whites, droned: "this is your only treatment option so please don't try and resist ok?" His plead wasn't charismatic, there was no warmth in it; it was a threat.

They didn't let me scream out; they clamped my mouth down and a piercing buzz and a deep penetrating pain twisted through the very core of my brain. Sensations of suffering pulsated and vibrated through my whole body.

As flashing images behind my eyes slowly faded to a merciless black, I awoke.