The Rapunzel Effect

Agoraphobia

I don't remember how my mother died. It wasn't like I was too young to remember as I was 6. I remember when I had fallen over and had to have stitches at 4. I remember my first birthday party with my friends when I was 5. I can still remember how the chocolate cake had stained my brand new green dress that made me tinker bell for the day. I just can't remember my mother dying. Maybe because the memory was simply too painful, I had blocked it out.

I don't really know.

I wished I did in a way because that way I could hold onto something personal between us. Our last special moment. Yet, due to me not remembering, that last moment has been lost into the abyss of time, tucked away in forgotten memories and lost hopes.

Anyhow, it's not that important. What's done is done and I shouldn't hold onto something that will eat me away for the rest of my life. I don't even have a picture of her. A faint embrace and a gentle voice still faintly lingers in my mind yet even then, it could be a figment of my imagination that I had conjured up over my childhood in remembrance of her. That would have to quench my thirst of my life before. Nevertheless, sometimes when I stare out the window at night, I sometimes wonder, what was of my life before. I faintly remember my father, a tall warm figure but my other mother has repeatedly reminded me that he's in a mental institute for the mentally insane. She says that after the distraught of my biological mother's death, he went on to try and murder me for I had reminded him of her too much.

This fact alone, after years of being drilled into my mind, stopped me from ever trying to pursue what might had happened if my mother hadn't perished from the disease within herself.

I never cried for her, even to this day when I know I should feel some remorse because although she was my mother who carried me for 9 months and looked after me for 6 years, I felt nothing attached to her. Although some random memories to clung to my consciousness, they held no emotion. As I was just watching a documentary and although interesting, they hold no feelings. Therefore, not a single tear was shed ten years on for my mother.

My other mother however has cared for me for a decade, adopting me after my father had lost his sanity. She said that I was unique, even as an infant. She said it was the way I had sat alone on the window sill in a room full of screaming children, and the way I composed myself even after the loss of my parents. My mother always wanted a child yet, due to her business womanly nature, she couldn't bear the wreckage young children brought along.

She wanted to adopt a child young enough to be brought up but old enough to skip the general distaste little ones brought with them. Therefore, she chose me, that little girl that didn't want to play but just sit and look out the window to freedom. That girl that had her short brown hair hanging by her ears where she had cut it out of frustration of being truly alone. I only wish that I could remember what I had been thinking that day.

"Rachel, come here!" I heard the familiar call to me. I sighed slightly and gingerly closed my diary and hid it underneath the floorboards. It was nearing 10 o'clock at night and I could feel the burn as I tried to hold open my heavy eye lids. I swung my feet from on the bed and made my way to the study where my mother had been doing a conference over Skype. As I passed my mirror, I couldn't help but look at my reflection.

My hair was now long and dark and fell to my waist. I strongly detested it, wishing it be shorter but my mother forced me not to cut it. Sometimes she would hire private hairdressers to go to my house and tend to the split ends but that was as far as it went. I was not allowed to communicate with them and the job would be done after 5 minutes of a swift and professional procedure. I was certain that surgeries had more verbal interactions than what I had.