LOS TIEMPOS PERDIDOS (THE LOST TIMES)

EPILOGUE: VANISH

"Is she alright?" A woman wearing a lab gown stands in the other side of the observation room as she watches her co-worker doing its job to the patient who had her eyes lost to the ceiling. The man on the other hand does its job as usual, trying to get her attention by greeting and talking to her but the woman in a straight jacket eerily turns her head to the man, she's pale and silent but her eyes display cold and seriousness.

"Get out of here." She said bringing up a warning on her voice. "You're disturbing us."

"I have to take your daily test." The man answered but she stood up and ran towards him. Too glad her hands were strapped to her back. "If I have the chance to get out of this jacket I would like to grab your neck and smash it into pieces!" She shouted but the nurses were fast enough to go to the scene grabbing her back to the place where she usually stays. They abruptly injected her with a Haladol, just a few minutes after that, the wild woman was found lying down on her bed with her eyes half closed.

"We're trying to help you, Joohyun."

--

"So I searched for the person she had told us." The woman from earlier said as they sat down in the cafeteria. "There's no one named Seulgi Kang nor Lorraine Lopez de Garcia and those other people she had talked about." The man across her shakes his head and laughs.

"Of course there wouldn't be any person bringing those names because all of them were just living at the back of her mind. Remember she was first diagnosed with a maladaptive daydreaming and as the years passed by, she started to get hallucinations thinking all those people were real and later on she's getting more and more out of control, she's aggressive."

"Can we do something about that?" The woman asked, her co-worker puts down his chopsticks to the table, his head perks up to face her.

"Of course we can but it is either her psychological problem or our lack of patience to her worsening condition may lead us to give up on her, she's getting out of hand, everyone knows that."

--

"Good morning to you, Joohyun." The door creaks open followed by the footsteps of a man wearing a lab gown. He's Jackson, a Chinese psychologist who was tasked to help her. Bae Joohyun, on the other hand was a woman born in Daegu. Back in her early twenties, her parents found her a little bit weird as she always isolated herself in her room for the whole day, dropped herself from her college university and that's how everything started.

"Do you have any new stories to share with me now?" The man started her recorder and placed it underneath the table. The woman shows signs of being calm, she's silent just like how her parents differentiate her personality before she turned to a huge mess.

"She says I'm a sinner." She started in a small voice, her head was hanging low obviously and was playing with her hands, the man decided to pull off the straight jacket off of her every time he needed to talk to her in one condition, everything was cut off around them, the camera's and the visibility of the glass from the inside.

"Go on, I can listen."

"It was night and raining, we were riding horses in the woods, Lorraine keeps on calling my name but she really hurts my ego."

"Why did she call you a sinner and why are you in the woods in the middle of the night in a bad condition?" Jackson rides with her stories as he was always trying to map out a mind map to help her to start getting treated. Joohyun had been spending quite a long time in their psychiatric facility and so as her psychiatrist, he just wanted to go back home in Hong Kong but the woman's condition pushes him to stay much longer just to help her.

"She caught me kissing Mateo, it was the urges pushing me to do so I wanted to get myself out of her, she's making me insane. I was trying to look for the welcoming feeling in him that I experienced from Lorraine but I couldn't find any then after that, we both got into a fight, if only I didn't do that she would be alive and I wouldn't be facing this problem now."

Joohyun was telling a story in two different timelines which concludes to a person living in a reincarnating pace where she thought that she's the one who was living as that person.

"After the accident happened in Alcala, I never got to see Seulgi again, then one night she just suddenly appeared in my hotel room and everything went dark." Joohyun said, the room became silent as she stopped from talking, Jackson stood up as he got her straight jacket hanging at the back of the door but the patient suddenly spoke once again.

"I killed her."

Three words but it was enough for the psychiatrist to turn around and face her. "What do you mean you killed her?" Even though they had tried various ways to treat her, the woman still kept intact to her daydreaming thinking all those people living at the back of her head were real and was breathing the same air as her.

Joohyun looked at him when a lone tear suddenly escaped from her eyes. "I can't re-write a story that has already come up to a conclusion."

--

Everything felt surreal but all those things had a need to come for an end. That's why,

"As she opens her eyes, the sun rises in the dark and everyone disappears. The woman looks up and realizes she had lost her time."