Fanta Chime {District 2}

Fanta Chime

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My name is Fanta Chime and I am a young, severely autistic female who speaks through music rather than words. I have lived seventeen turbulent and difficult years in the proud District Two, yet that doesn't make me any prouder.

Appearance [/font]

There’s nothing wrong with me: at least, nothing that you can see from the outside. If you scrubbed off all of the dirt, washed the greasiness from my hair, concealed the dark circles beneath my hollow eyes, magically caused all of my scars to disappear, and gave me a few pounds back, then I would probably look like a pretty normal seventeen-year old girl. Maybe a pretty one, even.

Beneath the numerous layers of mistreatment is a girl who appears to be no different from everyone else. However, that’s the main issue. At a first glance, you won’t find anything wrong with me, but you’ll probably start to pick up on my odd habits. Sometimes, I wish it were obvious that there was something different about me. I wish I was ugly, so easily deemed odd. Then maybe someone would help me.

If you look close enough, you will see that my eyes are almost always unfocused. Gazing in each and every direction, I fail to make eye contact with almost everyone I talk to. It’s a communication issue that I have. However, I like the color of my eyes. Last time I checked they were green, a fairly rare color. They often glow, I’m told, and although I very rarely see others’ eyes, the magnificence of my own often catch theirs.

My hair—last time I looked in a mirror—went a little further than shoulder length. But now, when I look down, it seems to be much longer. It’s almost reached the middle of my back. I usually don’t pay much attention to my hair, seeing as the utter darkness in the basement in which I now live is usually dim enough to hide most of my appearance. However, my hair’s constant mistreatment and failure to take care of it has caused it to become a tangled mess. Naturally, my hair is wavy, but in its unwashed state, it has become much flatter.

Often, I find locks of my own hair falling out. Because of the frequent starvation that I’m put through, it’s an irresistible effect. If my hair isn’t falling out, I’m usually pulling it out, from the stress of everything. I can’t stop myself; it’s a nervous habit. My hair only gets thinner and thinner as time progresses. However, I still pay little attention to the state of my appearance.

The color of my hair is debatable. It was once very blond actually, but with time, it’s become a bit darker, to the point where only blond streaks remain. Some people say it’s a dirty blond color, whereas others say it’s a light brown. The fact that I haven’t hit sunlight in so long and the fact that dirt has made its way into the mess of hair that surrounds my face has caused the blond streaks to fade.

I don’t know what my face looks like, to be honest. When I think of my face, I think of the face that I saw years ago in front of a mirror. I haven’t looked in a mirror in so long that if you asked me to visualize myself, I’d see a girl with a smooth face and bright eyes. However, I am almost positive that if I saw my face in a mirror at this very moment, I would be unrecognizable. I can only imagine a face caked with dirt and eyes with every last inch of life taken from them. I know that by now I probably look like a monster, a malicious animal only seeking to preserve my own life.

I am small. Having had little food in the past year, and even in my past as a whole, my growth has been a bit slower. At the community home, we were given meager intake, whereas now, my food intake is quite a bit worse. I am thinner than most girls should be, and although height isn’t as much of an issue, calling me tall would be a silly statement.

Still, I have broad shoulders. I always have. I have calluses along my hands from hard work, and scars from being beaten not only in this dark basement, but also back at the community home. I don’t have many muscles, but I’ve pushed myself hard enough to know that there is strength inside of those muscles. Maybe not physical strength, but determination at the least.

My clothes are raggedy and unwashed, yet I’ve learned to ignore that issue. If anything, I know that my slipping insanity isn’t just internal, but external too. I’ve only come to reflect the monster I am inside; or so it seems. But maybe I’m not a monster. Maybe I’m just different, unable to handle all of these obstacles put in my way.

Someday, I want to able to look at myself and see the girl who I truly am, not the girl that I come across to be.



Personality

The noise never stops. It just keeps going, on and on and on, and I can’t stop it. It doesn’t stop, it doesn’t stop, why won’t it stop!? How is it that you can’t hear anything, yet you can hear everything at the same time? How is it that some people can sit there and manage themselves so well, proving that everything is just so simple, when it’s not?

I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything except for the tunes that I store in the back of my memory. Although I can’t always hear them, I try. When my mind is so full of chaos, trying to fight off the loudest sounds and the most absurd thoughts, I reach out for those sweet melodies. Sometimes, though, they’re too far back. I can’t find them. They’re lost.

You wanna know my worst fear? My worst fear is that someday I’ll forget what it sounds like. I don’t want to forget; I don’t want to let go. But what if I do? What if everything that’s kept me alive crumbles to pieces? The music that fills my head is only growing fainter with time. As many times as I reach for it, it always manages to slip away again, just a little further.

When I think of music, I think of the stool that I am standing upon. When I look at the ceiling, I see sanity, lingering just beyond my reach. The stool beneath me is what keeps on the tips of my toes, reaching for what has been taken from me in small portions, more and more and more, as time takes its toll.

I can feel the stool beneath my feet shaking unsteadily. I am unsure how much longer it’ll hold me up. Once it cracks, I’ll fall, and once I fall, there’ll be no point in trying to reach the top anymore. The distance between the ceiling and I will be too far, not even worth trying to reach. Once I fall, my hope will too.

I wish I had the courage to ask people how they do it. How do they manage themselves so well, while I feel like I’m being fragmented into little tiny pieces after every minute passes by? Either they must be extremely strong, or I must be an outsider, an alien, the odd one out.

I suppose I don’t notice things like that too often; people must think the way I do, right? That’s what I’ve accepted. Everyone else is the same as me. I’m usually so busy sorting out my own thoughts that trying to analyze anyone else’s seems useless.

Some call me selfish, and it really makes me wonder. If my brain was just like everyone else's or if my condition just decided to randomly disappear one day, would I still be selfish? It's hard to let go of that behavior. Understanding others, noticing them: that all just gets too stressful to handle.

Honestly, if you had a million thoughts just wandering around your head, your brain desperately trying to process them all, which ones would you put as your first priority? Trying to sort out your own feelings, or noticing someone else's?

One misconception people often have about my character is that I am not anywhere near as smart as many others. They are very wrong. Although my brain works at a slower pace than most, the ideas that I've buried deep in my mind are just as intelligent as another smart kid's ideas. I am just not as skilled at communicating them.

That's because I'm autistic. No one's really managed to notice my autism; I heard the word once or twice throughout my past, but I haven't been intent on letting anyone know.

I like to think that my brain works in a unique way, but even I know that isn't true. It's just plain messed up. It takes me so much longer than the average individual to process my thoughts. Therefore, when I have too many, it gets chaotic. I often have to pick and choose which ones are more important and which ones to discard, in order to keep my mind in order.

I guess that's why I like being organized so much. By keeping to a strict schedule, my brain seems to stay calm and simple. Processing thoughts is much easier when you don't have many. Simplicity, therefore, is my road to success.

Although I'm an auditory learner most of the time, I'm also good with visual learning. However, words just don't appeal to me like sounds and pictures do. Words have so many complicated connotations, whereas a picture is straightforward. You don't have to go looking for answers when it's right in front of you.

I've never been good at making friends. My stubbornness along with my extremely terrible communication/speech skills added to my lack of empathy and interest in others have made this true. I have always been the weird girl, living in her own little world.

I don't really want to make friends most of the time, to be honest. It just makes things more complicated. When I was younger, I never did understand the other kids' pretend play. I wasn't able to apply myself correctly. Truthfully, listening to others talk and chat before you get your turn to let it all out--it all just gets boring after a while. I'm not patient enough to deal with other people.

Not only that, but my speech is extremely limited. After what's happened to me in the past, too many thoughts have clouded my brain, to the point where I've gone near-insane. My thoughts are so unorganized that I can barely speak anymore without letting gibberish flood from my mouth.

I'm extremely sensitive. When someone messes with me, I don't think twice before getting angry. It's because I just can't process the effects quickly enough. I get myself into something before I even know what I'm doing.

However, I have a strong sense of determination. I constantly focus in on what I want, setting goals that I know I will be able to reach. I do anything and everything to reach my goals; it's not that I'm heartless--it's just that focusing on one thing rather than a million is much easier.

It's also very easy to lure me off track, though. Focusing on one thing is difficult and uses a lot of energy. The many thoughts that fill my brain often distract me when a new goal is put before me, and they therefore make it harder for me to transition from one task to the next.

Yet, I try--I really do.



History

My past isn’t something I understand any better than the present. I can’t remember anything before the community home. In fact, sometimes I start to wonder whether such a time existed. I never knew my parents, nor any piece of my family, really. In fact, I was one of the honorary members of the community home, having resided there for longer than most of the other children.

I watched a lot of kids come and go. Abandoned. Adopted. Abandoned. Adopted. It was a never-ending cycle, although I tried not to let it get to me.

I spent most of my time in my own little world, wandering around aimlessly as I tried to get my thoughts straight. The structured schedule was helpful, yet not helpful enough. There was no one looking after me at all times, which only proved to be an unresolved issue. I wasn’t good at taking care of myself; I hadn’t reached that level of independence, and the idea that someday I would, still remained a question.

My speech developed late. While all the other children learned to hold up full conversations at an early age, I was slow. My words were fragmented and I only picked up on a few. Full sentences were difficult and I was usually unable to string a full line of words together.

There wasn’t much supervision in the community home. Instead, there were constant fights, frequent acts of theft, and toys ripped to shreds. Yes, the few coloring books that the community home owned were disgusting, which made many of the children quite upset. Quite honestly, there wasn’t anything to do in the community home except work, go to school—very little of course—and sleep on hard uncomfortable mattresses.

My mental condition, although I had no idea such a thing existed, caused me to wander often. I wasn’t independent enough to realize what dangers certain actions could do to me or how running away could affect my well-being and my future. I had a narrow line of vision and everything was two-dimensional in my eyes.

I remember one day when I was still only in my late toddler or early childhood years—probably five years old; I wandered so far as to make my way out of the community home in the middle of the night. I hadn’t been able to sleep that night, and I was tired of the hard mattresses and the mean little kids who didn’t let me play with the dinosaur. It was a late autumn night, chilly enough to cause the goose bumps that lined my arms.

I don’t know what might have happened to me had I not been seen. I would have gone missing, hardly noticed, only to meet my death in some unique little way. Yet, I had been lucky. As I wandered aimlessly across the gardens, there was a boy at the window, too sick to sleep. He’d been coughing into his pillow all night, trying to hide his deteriorating state.

Yet, he took a glance outside the window next to his bed, and at such a random chance, he saw me, skittering through the dark. I didn’t know he had seen me until there was a hand on my arm, pulling me back. I screamed, the impact of his touch startling me. He couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen when I looked back at him.

He put a hand over my mouth, trying to suppress the screeching sounds that escaped it as he told me I needed to come back inside. I struggled against him, my stubbornness getting the best of me. I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to understand. Yet, he managed to pull me inside just as all of the lights went on.

Because of my insistent screaming that had woken the community home staff, both of us received severe punishments. The boy didn’t even have time to explain himself before the hitting started.

However, amidst the punishments that resulted from my actions, there was at least one positive effect. They community home staff found out about the boy’s sickness. They administered whatever medicinal drug they could get their hands on, but the medics in District Two were nowhere near as advanced as the medics in District Six. With all of the diseases that passed through the walls of the community home and with minimal amount of care that the poor staff had for the children, the boy, who I found out was named Daniel, only worsened as the week progressed.

Even then, both my youth and my condition made me oblivious to what was going on. My empathy for Daniel’s sickness only reached so far. I thought he was my enemy: the obstacle in my way, and even though he had practically saved my life, I didn’t realize it.

Upon request, I visited his bedside one day, but I still didn’t feel anything. I still didn’t understand—and looking back at it, why didn’t I? Why didn’t I apologize or even thank the boy for saving me from the fate that could have been mine?

I didn’t even notice the sad look in his eyes as I gazed off into the distance, refusing to make eye contact with him. I was an odd child—there was no doubt about that—and with that came with my lack of empathy. The only thing I managed to say to him was, “You.” I hadn’t finished my sentence; I didn’t know how. The words were lost in some other train of thought: some train headed off to nowhere.

When Daniel died a few days later, I didn’t feel anything. One of the older kids told me, probably one of his friends, but I guess I just didn’t understand. Still. He was just another obstacle out of my way, another annoyance I could erase from my constantly spinning head. He hadn’t done anything for me, or so I believed.

Daniel’s death wasn’t publicized. The community home staff tried to keep quiet, believing that if they said anything, it would only cause more trouble. My life continued on just as it had in the past. Yet, I suppose, more people were coming to see my progressing abnormalities. I wasn’t like the other children. I was different.

Honestly, it all really narrowed down to my social skills. I didn’t talk to other children unless they had something that I wanted. When others tried to play with me, I found a new place to keep to myself. Yet, even then, I wasn’t an active dreamer. I didn’t actually know how to play make-believe, building a fantasy land from nothing. I had to have something in my hands—something real—to put my beliefs in anything.

When people asked me questions, I failed to give them complete answers. My speech was distorted, and although the words in my brain seemed so realistically ideal, the words that escaped my lips were not. I received many punishments during my early years of schooling, for I could never answer anything correctly. I knew it all, and that’s what bothered me, yet I failed to get my words across.

When it was time for play, I rushed to get my hands on the same doll every day when the toy cabinet was opened. It was a raggedy old thing, caked in dirt, covered in layers of stains, yet I couldn’t let go of it. Because there was such a limited amount of toys, sharing was necessary. Yet, that was something I was not inclined to do. Therefore, every time someone else went for my doll, complaining about how they never got a turn, I took a run for it. I screamed and I cried and I broke down when it was taken away from me; I can’t even count how much trouble that doll got me into.

The older children in the community home were even more concerned than the staff when it came to my behavior. My strange attachment to that doll kept everyone away from it. In fact, I might as well have signed my name on it. Everyone always knew who the new children were, the ones just picked off the streets, because they were always the ones grabbing for my doll. The others knew better.

No one truly understood me. Every day, I was off in my only little world, mumbling nonexistent words and muddled gibberish as I held my doll close.

My life turned around when I was six. I had just been dismissed from dinner, and I had chosen to spend my time wandering, as always. The community home wasn’t huge; in fact, it was quite packed, housing more kids than it was built for. Yet, there was a storage room that I suppose I had never noticed before.

As I pranced through the bedrooms, I heard something, and I didn’t know where it was coming from. It was something so unfamiliar, so foreign. It almost hurt my ears, in a curious respect of course. I finally found the source of the sound, behind a closet door. When I pushed it open, I didn’t bother to scan the cramped room. There was a piano, steadied against the wall. At first, I didn’t even know what it was, but there was a girl sitting at it.

Before she could stop playing, I placed my hands on the piano in a banging manner, distorting what had been a beautiful sound only seconds earlier. She shied away, letting me extend my curiosity to this new and foreign instrument. “Do you want to learn how to play it?” She asked, her blue-green eyes glowing. She was probably about fifteen, with short-cropped light brown hair. I stopped playing when she asked the question, letting thoughts invade my mind once more as I avoided her eyes. I couldn’t pick apart it all, but I was finally able to let a delayed word out.

“No,” I said. The half-smile on her face only highlighted my immature youthfulness. She stood up from the piano bench and made her way towards the door. “Alright,” she said. Maybe she knew that making friends with a girl so young was put plainly, an odd idea: an absurd idea.

Yet, I still came back the next day, not for the girl, but for the piano. Again, she was playing it when I walked in. It was only then that I noticed the stack of books on the floor with useless words written across the cover. Unlike the day before, I waited for the song to end before jumping onto the instrument. It sounded like something I had heard in a dream, but never in reality. I was mesmerized, pulled out of the confused state that I found so difficult to escape.

When the girl finished, words flooded from her mouth but I caught nothing. Something about the composer’s name and how magnificent it was; useless words really. With a straightforward attitude, I climbed up onto the bench, seating myself next to the girl. She tried to show me what to do, but quickly I became frustrated and confused. Everything that slipped from her lips seemed to get muddled into the remaining mess that filled my brain. So, instead, I just banged the keys a bit longer.

On the third day, I am pretty sure the girl figured out I was a lot more trouble than the other little kids. I was just a mess you couldn’t clean up; a girl so lost you had to take her back to the beginning.

Madelyn was her name. I was right; she was fifteen years old. She used simple words to help me understand her story. Her parents were dead. How? My curiosity didn’t reach far enough to ask.

As time progressed, I listened more closely as her fingers skid across the keys. The beautiful sound that wafted from her fingers made me someone else temporarily. Every time I heard the piano, as excruciatingly painful as the tone—it had barely been touched for years--was, I felt like I was finally able to control what went on in my brain. I felt like it all moved a little quicker, everything slowly starting to run in the right direction.

The effects of hearing such music made me desperate to learn how to make it myself. Madelyn tried her best to remain patient as she concisely explained how to play. Each day, after dinner, I met her in the same place: the storage closet on the second floor.

However, I could never sit for long, and Madelyn could see that. It wasn’t even a childish behavior; no doubt, it reached much deeper than that.

Turned out, I had a natural skill for piano. Within the first few lessons, I was already able to play, and within the next few, I was trying to pluck through my own creations. It wasn’t prodigious, but it was something else entirely. It was karma. Whatever condition I had: not all of the effects were negative.

Madelyn seemed quite stunned by my fast-paced learning. When she used the right words effectively, it became easier for me to understand. She knew I was different. When I was advanced enough, Madelyn pulled out a few folded sheets of paper from her pocket. Curiosity filled me as she revealed their contents.

There were dots all over them. Madelyn said she had kept them after her parents died, having ripped them from a couple of the old piano books that littered her home. Still, I did not question her parents' death. Madelyn placed one of the sheets before me and began teaching me how to read the dots. They were so different than reading words, so much better; no, actually--the dots were words themselves. Beautiful words.

I was never a good reader, yet these words I was successfully able to string together. The dots on the torn pages were things I could take pride in.

There came a day when the storage room was empty. I waited for Madelyn, supposing she hadn't finished dinner yet. However, she never came. Playing the piano didn't feel right without her. When I put my hands to the keys, they felt hollow and the sound immediately felt dull. The striking feeling of loneliness was too strong, so I stopped playing and returned to bed.

I kept my eye out for Madelyn all week, but I never did see her anywhere. During the evenings after dinner, I waited for her in the storage closet. She never came. After a while, I started giving up. In fact, the fight against my never-ending sea of thoughts that I'd been winning for so long, started to turn around. I was losing, falling back into chaos.

Finally, Madelyn approached me one night while I was sleeping. Kneeling next to my bed, she said that she had gotten to the age where the community home staff required her to do even more work. She said she'd only be able to play piano with me on the weekends. Still, she gave me the rest of her music sheets and told me to keep at it.

I couldn't do it. Not at first. Playing by myself at such a young age--I just couldn't keep myself motivated. I kept switching between pieces, trying to pluck out the notes. The dots became boring without someone there to help me read them, so instead, I made up my own pieces.

The weekends were all I had to look forward to. Sometimes, I couldn't wait that long and I often got impatient, banging the piano in frustration. When Madelyn was there, we played for hours into the night, trying not to wake up the other kids. Still, we took long breaks in order to cure my short attention span.

Madelyn was the best person in my life whereas music was the best thing. If I put them together, I got happiness and clarity; with that combination, I was a normal kid with normal dreams and normal thoughts. When the combination of music and Madelyn became unbalanced, I was back to being the odd one out.

Madelyn was like my older sister, or even my mother. She was the only person I had left in my life who truly cared for me. Although I almost never said a word to her, the music that we shared meant more than any string of words could mean to me. One day, I was showing her a piece of my own creation when she started crying. I was unsure of whether to stop or not, but I kept going until the piece was finished.

"I'm sorry." Her words were distorted by the tears. My gaze wandered as she spoke. "You make me remember my little sister, Mona." She tried to keep her words simple and understandable. "She played good piano." My gaze followed her index finger as she pointed it at the keys. Taking a deep breath as to hide her oncoming tears, she said simply, "Mona is gone."

"I can't find her."

The next few moments were silent as Madelyn held me close. It took me a few minutes to process everything that she had said, but the moment it sunk in, I played with the name a bit. "Mona." I didn't have anything to add except for the internal empathy that seemed to be sunk down and hidden by the many other daunting thoughts that filled my brain.

The next day, Madelyn's tears were gone and we resumed our normal habits.

Yet, my thoughts of Mona kept pushing to the front of my mind. During the middle of our playing, I stopped, letting my gaze wander again. Words found a way out of my mouth somehow, although I don't think I had let them. "Mona dead?" I asked awkwardly, trying to get the correct grasp on my speech.

"I don't know," Madelyn said gravely. We then continued.

During the weekdays, I was always overjoyed when I saw Madelyn's face amongst the crowd of children. Quite honestly, she was my only friend. No one else had the patience to deal with me.

A few days before her eighteenth birthday, Madelyn told me she was going to leave. She wasn't allowed to stay at the community home anymore, for she had reached the age when you're expected to grow up and take your life into your own hands.

She told me she'd come back sometime. And I believed her.

However, I didn't fully understand the concept of leaving. Madelyn leaving seemed so absurd, so impossible. Yet, when she left, I realized I had lost the only person that I cared for in my life. I kept waiting for her in the storage closet, or seeking her out during dinner, but she was nowhere to be found. She left me.

I cried that week. I couldn't stop. The storage closet remained unoccupied, as revisting such a place only made my heart hurt worse. I receieved constant punishments for my behavior, but I was too numb to care. I hadn't even realized how much Madelyn meant to me until she was gone.

For the next few weeks, I let my insides eat away at me. I was alone again: the girl who had a brain that just didn't work right, the girl whose words came out in a jumbled mess.

I tried escaping again. I wanted to find Madelyn; I wanted to sit down on the piano bench with her again, watching as the music from her fingers told me the stories that I could never listen to when spoken aloud. Then, after that, I wanted to cry--not through tears, but through melodies--letting my fingers glide across the keys.

Before my feet even touched the road that led to the rest of the world, I was caught by one of the staff members and punished even more severely. People had to keep their eyes out for me; my troubling behavior never seemed to end.

I tried returning to the piano again, playing alone this time. It was a bit discouraging, knowing that I was the only one to hear this beautiful music, yet sinking back into my secluded nature seemed like an okay future.

For the next several years, my life in the community home continued. Yet, my spirit, my conscience, and my soul resided somewhere else entirely. They were hidden beneath the strings inside the piano, beneath the surfaces of the keys, admist the sound waves that filled the storage closet. I only truly lived when I was engulfed in that free feeling of music.

I kept hoping that Madelyn would come back one day, to take me out of the community home, so empty-feeling as people came and left. She never did.

My abnormal state only deteriorated with time. I often felt as though I was still a child, having never grown out of some of the unusual behaviors. My speech, although better than in the past, was still weak in comparison to most individuals'.

One day, I put my fingers on the handle to the storage closet, but it wouldn't open. I kept trying to turn it, not wanting to admit to the fact that it was locked. After that didn't work, I kicked the door. I managed to create a slight dent in the wood, but I failed to do much more than that. I was thought in a moment's time, punished severely for my actions.

I was done here.

I was sick of it all. Every time I looked around at the community home I resided in, I could just see it falling apart. The little sparkle that it had possessed during my earlier childhood was completely gone; and even though there was a countless number of orphans residing in the home, it seemed like a big, empty mansion to me.

Just as I had done when I was a child, I wandered off at sixteen years of age. It was my third attempt to run away, and it was, in fact, my only successful attempt. I didn't have anything to bring with me, except for the music in my mind. However, I didn't really think my actions through. Running away meant leaving the storage closet piano behind. What if I never found a piano to play again? Again, my mental condition caused me to overlook these possibilities.

I didn't know where I was going--to find Madelyn maybe? However, as I walked aimlessly through the district, down unfamiliar paths, I was captured. The next time my eyes opened, there was nothing to see except darkness on all sides.

I was shivering, lying on the floor, encaged in some sort of cell. I couldn't process it; everything seemed to be weighing me down, filling my brain like a thick liquid. A man asked me my name, but I couldn't answer. I didn't know what was going on; everything in front of me was just a blur.

Then came the punishments, just like in the community home, except much much worse. I was finally able to croak out my name after receiveing a countless number of beatings. "Fanta," I said, and it stopped. But the starvation didn't.

It was worse than the community home: much worse, yet I didn't fully come to realize that until a man's large hands grabbed me and threw me out of my cell about a month or two after I'd arrived--maybe more. Keeping track of time was impossible, especially when there was no sun to tell me when a day had passed.

Sure, I could handle the beatings and the starvation--besides, we hadn't been treated too finely in the community home either--, but when I was told to kill the girl that standed in front of me, that was something that I was nowhere near strong enough to bear.

When they said her name, I broke. "Mona versus Fanta. Ready, set--" I couldn't breathe. I recognized the name from somewhere, but I couldn't remember where. As I reached back into my distant memory, Mona was able to successfully land an attack on me.

I finally recollected my thoughts, realizing that this was Madelyn's sister: the one that had gone missing so long ago. Tears filled my eyes, not from the emotions that overcame me, but from the physical pain. I couldn't fight back, but being that it was my edge on the line, I was forced to.

My whole life, I'd been narrow-minded and selfish. It was part of how my brain worked: seeing only what was in front of my eyes. I suppose that's what had carried me through that fight, managing to temporarily erase the memories, and think only of the present.

I don't know how I did it, but in a matter of minutes, Mona was lying on the ground, blood seeping everywhere. The realization struck me when I looked into her dead, unmoving eyes. I killed her. I killed my best friend's sister--no, I had done even more than that.

In that single moment after the fight was finished, I hoped that I never would escape this place to find Madelyn again, the one person I had shared my music with for years, because I knew that living with that amount of guilt would kill me more than a couple of strong fists ever could.

But after that, it all went downhill. The speech that I'd built up gradually throughout my childhood disappeared. There were too many thoughts haunting and occupying my brain. Picking apart my thoughts was like undoing an unbearable number of inseparable knots. It just wasn't worth it anymore.

I was so numb this time, that I couldn't even feel myself slipping into insanity. It just happened. I stopped trying to sort out my thoughts, and let myself stumble through them instead. My insanity seemed to lessen every time my thoughts directed themselves towards music. I would drum my fingers against the floor, remembering the feel of the piano keys. Still, the music was only a creation of my the memories that filled my head. Sometimes, that just wasn't enough.


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