My life ended and began on the day my brother attempted suicide.
I was sixteen, he was nineteen. He had been on medication for Bi-polar for a few months. For the next few months, I barely ate, slept, spoke, or moved. I began to feel split up, uhwhole and raw. As though there were two people inside me.
I first saw Lucy when I was cleaning out my closet one afternoon in August. She was in the spare room next door to mine, and though I did not see her face, I saw her feet beneath the closet door. She was standing inside it, scratching on the door. She wanted out. I ran.
It was around then that the trees began to move eerily, to catch my eye and make contact with me. They whispered to me in ways that nothing ever had. They wanted me to come with them when they died that fall, to find them on the “other side.” They spoke to my heart, to my soul. I believed them and promised to go along when they did. I began to slip into worlds that were far different from our own. Cosmic, gorgeous worlds that one can hardly imagine. The trees called me to be their own, to be their child. To be one with them.
The people inside me began to multiply rapidly. There was Lucy, who I saw regularly in the mirror. We fought and argued all the time. She poked me and pinched me and screamed at me. Then there was Liam, who was actually a real person. My friend. He could feel my feelings, hear my thoughts, see what I was doing. I had no privacy left. Our minds were connected. There were the sisters: Charlotte, Penelope, and Victoria. They needed my help, they wanted me to save them. There was the scarecrow and his alias, Lord Effiddian. He wanted to kill me, to drink my blood and eat my soul. He wanted my hair, my violin, my life. He would eat away my music and murder what was left. He was a brute.
I went on medication two months ago. My father finally realized something was wrong. I hadn’t been eating, sleeping, doing my school work, or even speaking. I COULDN’T speak. I couldn’t move! It was impossible for me to do either of those without the greatest of pain in my soul, in my mind. Colors were either grey or too intense. My thoughts were so loud that I could hear them and sometimes see them. The worlds were so gorgeous–and so terrifying. There was nothing I could do. I felt nothing. My sister cried and I was repulsed. My mother asked me to talk to her and I couldn’t. I was a monster.
Since going on medication, I have begun to recollect my abilities as a violinist, to remember that I am a human being and that my thoughts are my own. I sometimes feel that I have no privacy of thought, that there are too many people talking inside me…but it’s quieter for the most part. Things aren’t so painful anymore.
