The Loneliness of Distant Beings

Chapter Twenty-Three

Dear Dom,

They won't let you come to me, and so all I do is wait. Any time I'm not with you is just time spent waiting to see you; that's how it's been since the moment we met. But it's harder now I'm in here and I know you can't come to me. Everything is harder now.

I've told you before I'm not strong. This is something that I know about myself, something I have learned to live with and accept. And so I'll admit that I completely flip out when they tell me they are putting me here and keeping me here and that they won't let me see you. You don't even think about how you would feel in this situation until it happens to you, and when it does you know how feeling caged like an animal will make you act like one.

So here I am and I have forgotten how to speak, and I only need to do this for a little while before I start to forget who I was before and I start being something new. So that's how come I end up as a person I don't know. Someone who doesn't sleep, who is wound into tight metallic coils by sleeplessness. This is how little you realise that sleeping at night is something you need as surely as oxygen until you don't have it any more. I am so furious that they are keeping me here, keeping me from you, and at the same time all I feel is guilt, because it was me, wasn't it, that caused all this and so, really, I am the only one to blame for it all, and so this is what I think about when I should be sleeping, round and round in a circle with no respite. Round and round until I am coiled so tight I can't breathe, and I no longer know if I am hot or cold, and can't even remember what it feels like to be tired.

I guess you know that Correctional has two sections, one for males and one for females. And each half is divided into crazy and criminal. This isn't what they call it. They call it Mental Health and Reformatory, but we all know what they mean.

I am sharing the berths with this woman called Beth whose life partner somehow ended up dead before she managed to carry a baby that was born alive (she carried three that weren't). So, I mean, you know how it works here – the show must go on. They don't let a thing like death get in the way of their precious breeding programme. And the irony is that this last baby actually survived, and now she's so messed up by it all she can't love him, can't even stand to hold him. Everyone wonders why she's depressed but, really, it's not rocket science – she's just got a horrible life.

Along the side of the day room is this two-way mirror and I guess on the other side of it is always a nurse, and it's probably mostly this guy called Ronaldo who has the sides of his head shaved and tattoos on his arms. He is there so he can check that we don't try to bash our brains out on the wall or whatever. And so we don't. Instead we just listen to the hospital noises: the buzzing and the screaming and the way the nurses talk when they are switching shift which feels like something from another world.

Every eight hours this Ronaldo or maybe someone else comes in and takes our vitals, pumping up blood pressure sleeves and taking temperatures, dishing out drugs that put our rational brains in the can and leave us in a dazed stupor. And then on top of all this, come first session he still wants me to put my trainers on and go on the circuit. And look, I mean, I do it, mostly because it means I get to go out, even though he goes with me, running along next to me with his sweaty elbow against mine all the way and his breath hitching where I can hear it, and all the guys I have seen a million times on circuit leaving this little circle of space around me, as if whatever I have might be catching. But you know, suddenly being out on View and Main feels like a luxury, so I do it, and running has never been so easy. When you are in the position that I am in, running, as if in flight, feels more natural than anything else, and it is the only time my mind stops turning on me, consuming itself.

They tell me from the start that you will not be allowed to visit me, and so I worry and think about you. I wonder how you will feel to be facing these charges when all you ever did was live your life and be who you were, and who you were was someone who was in love with me.

They watch me; they carry on watching me. When I take a shower, Ronaldo stands with his foot in the door. When I wake up at whatever time, pulling the blankets against my chest, convinced they are your arms, deep in a dream, I hear the camera changing angle, and I know they are watching me on the bank of screens in the nurses' station.

Pan comes in one morning just to sit in the day room with me while I hold Deborah on my knee. Pan keeps asking me to talk but she doesn't seem to have any suggestions as to what I should talk about, so I don't. I look at Deborah so deeply, so steadily, that it probably seems weird, but all the time I am wondering about her, about how she will grow, whether she will be crazy too.

My dad comes and just sits, sits next to me and tells me I'm thin, and there is nothing more to it than that, other than the fact that it is the other nurse, Sandra, who is on duty at that time and after he leaves she goes on about what a sweet guy he is, which is probably the kind of thing people will say about my dad in his eulogy, and I find myself thinking that really, when you think about it, it's not much to have to show for your life.

My grandfather doesn't come. He is the kind of man who doesn't come where he knows he will not be wanted.

When Mariana doesn't come I guess she blames me for all this and is as angry with me as I am.

And anyway, look, I begin to be not at all sure if I even want anyone to come and see me the way I am with my big black eye bags and white skin and face that looks, to me, like a death mask, dead and still and stiff and waxy and pale.

I don't eat and, even though it's only been a couple of weeks, I start to fade away, I start to take up less and less space in this world. And I even start to wonder if I will die here, trapped alone deep inside this ship, way out in space, drifting through the stars. Don't they realise that keeping me from you is killing me as surely as turning off the oxygen?

I guess I never told you that your body, your skin, is the first thing I can remember that I have ever felt this way about, the first smell that has soothed me, the beat of your heart the first sound that has ever felt like home. You were not made to be mine, and yet written right through every cell of your being is a message just for me. I guess this only proves something we've known all along: that there are some things you just can't make in a science lab.

And so I spend whatever time I can thinking of ways to escape. But don't worry, because this time things are different. Now, since I've known you, I no longer think about escaping the same way I did before, the way my mother did. Instead I dream of ways to get out of here, to get to you, to find a way to you, my love.

So wait for me.

With all my love,

Seren

More coming later this week for Seren and Dom! If you enjoyed this chapter, please don't forget to vote – thanks.

The Loneliness of Distant Beings has been published, but to get it in front of as many people as possible I'm posting it to the lovely Wattpad community. The plan is to have it all up before the publication of my second book - The Glow of Fallen Stars - in August.

If you can't wait to read the ending, or just love the feel of real pages, then you can purchase Loneliness from your local bookshop or online retailers!