THE DREAM CATCHER

24. MEMORY

This is not the first time I've been locked up in mental asylum. It's actually the third time. My first experience with this dark, suffocating, cruel place happened when I was 7. I shouldn't remember it so well because I was so young. But I do. I do remember every detail of my stay there. Just, I don't know the cause. I never did. One day I just woke up in a steel cage. The second time was identical. The third as well. But I remember the first time was the worst, left a scar unable to erase on my brain. I though it's unable to erase. Until someone did. I woke up sweaty, tired, beaten up. Bruises scattered  my body like a pattern of dotted dress. I don't know till this day what happened a day before. It's a gaping, black hole. I woke up curled up in a bundle on a cold, marble floor in a cold, marble, empty room. And I was separated by a cage. Cage looked like the one animals in zoo are kept in. The ceiling and walls were steel grate. And there was nothing else in this room but my prison. And a door at the end of the room I couldn't reach. I sit up and looked around, my heavy breath bouncing of the walls of the room. I was too stunned to speak, to move. I was convinced it's a bad dream. It must had been. There was no other explanation for kidnapping and keeping hostage a 7 years old girl. I was just a kid. I didn't do nothing wrong. But my dreams about it being just a nightmare were shattered the moment a man dressed in white coat entered the room, eyes pinned to the pile of papers he was holding. I didn't move. I couldn't. I didn't breathe when he approached my grate cage and lifted his eyes on me.
,,How are we feeling?" He asked gifting me with a shy, caring smile, so inappropriate in a place he found himself in.
I didn't answer. I just looked at his middle aged face blindly, focusing on light reflecting off his glasses. He let out a sigh of resignation and scratched his temple slowly.
,,Do you remember anything from yesterday?" He asked knowing I'll not answer his previous question. I didn't even know for how long I've been locked up here. I didn't know what time of a year it was, what time of a day. But I certainly didn't know what happened yesterday. So I just nodded my head in response. Shaky, trembling move, more like a post-mortem contraction than a living human gesture.
,,Good." He said noting something in his papers, not looking at my scared, shattered body. And then he turned around on his heel and persuaded to leave. Just like that. No explanation, no words of comfort. Nothing. So I did the only thing my devastated body let me to do. I started screaming. Screaming so much I felt my lungs being eaten by fire. So much I felt my dry lips crush. So much my eyes were burning from tears. My body shaking in convulsions. And suddenly, when the doctor left the room, a group of people dressed in white uniforms stormed into the room, opened the cage and approached me. I didn't stop screaming. Actually, I started screaming even louder. I screamed as one of them grabbed me from behind and pressed a hand dressed in glove to my lips trying to silence me. As the other one held my legs pinned to the ground, as the third caught my hands and held them behind my back. My stifled scream was a horrible growl of mistreated animal. But it started to blur out after the forth one of the doctors/nurses/monsters stuck a huge needle in my neck and the pain silenced the scream. And then, sleep silenced the pain. As I think about it now, it was one of the last times I felt. Anything. Then my emotions started to degrade to the point I felt nothing at all.