Palacia
((This story clipping came as a stunning surprise to me about four months ago when I went through an inventory of my old stories. I have no memory of writing this although the original writing, torn out of pages written in an old diary are in my handwriting as hard as it was to read. This in my opinion is truly the jewel of my scrapped stories. I'm not sure where it was meant to go or who this young woman is but I want to know more and there's a good chance you'll be hearing more of her too. She's recently been making a niche for herself in my brain and slowly but surely is making her presence known. She wants to be heard and it's likely she will be or I'll end up just like her. There is little more that I can say for this story other than that I'm sorry that it's written as one long paragraph but I'm giving it to you as I found it, errors and all. Tell me what you think.))
And so she had lain there while days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months. She had never been a very athletic person but slowly what little muscle mass she had accumulated throughout her life atrophied and fell away. Having been somewhat on the heavy side it might have pleased her under other circumstances to drop completely out of that range and even normal range to find herself in the category of medically underweight. There was that term again. Medically underweight. She heard that term so often that it no longer seemed a scary term. Medically speaking she had been catatonic for 6 months. From a medical stand point there was very little hope that she would ever make a recovery let alone a full one. That was out of the question. She had heard all of this, lying there trapped inside of her own body, unable to move or speak or make any sign that could clue anyone in that she was anything more then a vegetable, other then brain waves. The doctors couldn’t explain it other then to say that maybe there was a problem with the equipment or the young resident who had read the read off must have marked something wrong or any number of other reasons that while they sounded very logical were all untrue. For a time all she knew was pain and a sound of someone screaming, screaming and screaming even when there could have been nothing left to scream with and yet no one else seemed to notice and so she realized at length that the screaming was her and that it was only in her mind. Her vocal chords had been damaged she found out from one doctor who talked to the teary eyed woman who sat at her side for several weeks and then had suddenly disappeared. A stern yet matronly looking attendant replaced her. It took time for her to find the door that had led her into her own mind but it had been a day… or had it been night, it was hard to tell in this sterile white environment, to remember. She had dropped into the depths of despair and the doctors had all but given up hope. Yes, medically nothing had changed but yet her body was rejecting the nutrients coming from the many IV’s and wires hanging from her body like so many leaches. The first woman had returned once, only once and she had leaned down next to her ear and whispered that she was sorry, had begged her to forgive her and then had walked away not to return. She had found the door that day but it was not for nearly two weeks that she actually found a way in. If it had been the old her, the one who turned away at the first sign of adversity, who dreaded any amount of conflict, she might have given up and drifted away on the ever present sea of pain and let it overtake her and let that be that but she was no longer that person. She was a being forged in the fires of hell that were the confines of her body and trained by the merciless master that was pain and emptiness. She had lost everything and yet she didn’t even know the extent of what she had lost. Madness had crept in and taken up residence but it was a kindly friend in comparison with the unforgiving fiend that was emptiness. It might even have been this madness that had brought her to think that maybe, just maybe the door was not what it seemed and to turn and place her hand on the plain unimpressive stones along it’s edge. Even then she might have given up, very nearly had given up when suddenly one of the stones moved in it’s foundation and the door had open to send her sprawling across the entryway. She had lain there for, she did not know how long, time no longer had meaning to her, before she picked herself up and brought her mental body the rest of the way into the fortress that was her mind. It was bleak in there when she had made her first visit. Cobwebs covered nearly every inch of the walls and ceiling and the floor had been so thick with dust that she could see her own footprints as she walked. She knew she was alone here as there were no other prints in the grime. She had done very little exploring that day and had left out of habit rather then necessity only to return an undetermined period of time later to continue her search. It took up time as she lay there and it took her mind off of the ever-present pain and reminded her that she was still there and not just a feeling of pain. Many of the rooms were locked and she did not have the key and those that were open contained merely filing cabinets full of what looked like charts and logs pertaining to daily life and what had gone on to her physically, mentally, and emotionally. She found no record of anything before waking up in white hospital room and it was frustrating. Frustrating enough to almost make her quit, turn around and return to the bitter comfort of her pain but something kept bringing her back. It was not until her sixth visit that she found out the truth of this fortress. She had been wishing that there was a broom so that she might do some tidying up and when she had turned to leave yet another file cabinet she was startled to find one leaned up against the wall waiting for her. It had been frightening to her but she had long sense stopped questioning what was. It had all started out simply a wish here, an imagining there but slowly her mental fortress had changed. She had added candles to light the passages and carpets to warm the floors but it still took her time before she made any large changes, really she had no real understanding of the capabilities of this place until she had sat day dreaming in one of the filing rooms that she had converted into a crude resemblance of a study, about how nice it would be to have a library and then had left for the day only to find a new room with a dark cherry wood door, much unlike the other rooms with their stark stainless steel doors. She hesitated for but a moment, before she pushed the door open to find a lavish library precisely to her specifications. Unfortunately, as she found, it was a little too precise. She had not actually thought of any titles she would want to see on her shelves so when she went to pull out a book she found it blank from cover to cover. She found it was not as easy as she had first thought to imagine up books. Books were not like a broom that if it looked right it was. Books were detailed and complicated. They took painstaking time and effort to remember full plots, names, details but she had nothing better to do and all the time in the world in which to build up her library. She was in fact ecstatic when the old nurse suddenly disappeared to be replaced by a young woman dressed like the first but with a stud through her nose and her hair cropped short like a boy’s and dyed black. This woman while somewhat rougher then the last when it came to dealing with her physical body, had a weakness, surprisingly, for the classics and read them aloud, albeit starting each session off with, ‘I don’t know why I bother when we both know you have no idea I’m even here but…’ This made things easier. It seemed the reports detailed every bit of each of these stories and it was just a matter or imagining up a binding for them before she could put them on the shelves.
