The Shadow That Smiled At Me

Chapter twenty nine

I went back to hell.

My parents locked me up in some kind of home for youth with problems dividing dreams from reality. A fancy name for an institution for the insane. Fortunately, it wasn't like the one you see in the movies. Closed, in a straitjacket, in a windowless room and treated with electricity. A treatment is more like torture, where they break you more than they fix you. I had my own room with a comfortable bed. A balcony with a view of the garden, on which I could freely move. The only thing that reminded me of where I was was the sterility of the hospital-like interior and its whiteness. The joy has long since disappeared from those spaces.

Every day I had to attend sessions with a psychiatrist. He was an elderly man with a bald head. His face was marked by time with significant wrinkles. He looked older than he was supposed to look like in his forties. He kept asking me the same questions over and over. "Can you tell me your name?" Which I found completely irrelevant since he knew exactly what my name was. "Tell me about your childhood." "What about your friends and family?" He always started with the usual questions about me and my life and gradually worked his way up to questions about my insanity. "When did you start seeing those things?" "How did it all start?" "Can you tell me something about your visions, about the boy you're seeing?" "What's his name?" He had one of the drawings of Samael that I once drew. Every time he showed it to me, the crack in my heart grew a little bigger. "What usually happens when you see him?"

I never answered any of these questions. I just sat there silently and looked at him, sometimes frowning, other times with a blank look. I listened to him ask me one question after another, thinking about the answer but never saying it out loud.

This is how it went day after day. Every morning and every evening, for an hour, the doctor pestered me with his irrelevant questions, watched my reactions, until finally he gave up and let me go. I was silent. I was silent and silent and silent. I had nothing to say to him. He has nothing to do with it. All I wanted to say was to shout in his face what a fool he is to tell people that they are not normal just because they are not like others. I don't want to live with wolves, so I won't howl them.

Every morning they shoved crazy pills into me and I threw them down my throat like an obedient little girl - at least I convinced them of that. They were stupid enough not to see through my trick.

Life at the institute moved in a routine - wake up at six, breakfast at eight, meeting with the doctor at ten, lunch at twelve, then I could do whatever I wanted throughout the afternoon, if I stayed on the premises of the institute, at seven dinner, another session with the doctor at eight and going to sleep at ten. I felt like a small child under supervision. The only bright moment was when I watched the starry sky on the balcony during the night instead of sleeping. No sight far and wide, just me, the stars, the moon and the darkness. The deafening silence was broken only by the chirping of crickets carried from a distance.

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After four weeks and three days, the doctor decided it would be best for me to return to my parents. But even that didn't change my silence.

They came for me early in the morning and took me home. I entered my old room full of ghosts. They had already moved all my things back to LA. A closet full of my clothes, boxes full of my unpacked things they didn't know where to put them. My parents left me alone so that I could deal with things in peace and get used to this house, this room again.

I started rummaging through things packed in boxes. Actually, that's how I realized that I didn't even own many things - most were books and sketchbooks with drawings. I definitely own more clothes than anything else. I unpacked everything and put it in place. During that time, I remembered the past written in those things. Fake and fake. I hated it. I hated myself. How could I let it go this far? How could I destroy myself for the supposed peace of mind? How did that happen?