{ Sad Dream } || Eleanor & Jem

She calls me Eleanor and treats me as if we are the greatest of friends but this morning when I woke up I was remembering that I did not have a mother. She passed away when I was just small. However, there she was, sitting across the table from me, lips pressed together in a firm line, fingers wrapped around the stem of her long black cigarette holder so as not to yellow them. She is my mother but she seems wrong somehow, as if she doesn't really belong to me at all.

There she is, the stranger I share the breakfast table with.

I pass her the orange juice as requested and do not bother to pretend to eat the eggs piled on my plate. I claim feelings of sickness. Morning sickness I want to say. My body knows the term but I do not personally. I have yet to be pregnant. I am expected to become pregnant when I marry Edwin in three months. I am expected to pop out baby after baby without a word of complaint. I don't know if I like children. I cannot remember.

Mother dearest claims that I must not be hungry because my body is still recovering from the surgery. I do not think that this is true, I think that it's just the same as it ever was. I am not eating this morning because I do not see the point. The feelings of listlessness are overwhelming today. I can feel them heavy in my throat creating a lump that I somehow have to speak around.

My mother still believes that the train was an accident. I cannot find it within myself to tell her that I was never pushed but I cannot find it within myself to try leaving another way either. Attempting to kill myself had been the bravest thing I had ever done in my life. I do not have the courage to try again.

The smell of toast makes bile rise in my throat.

The feeling of emptiness grips me so strongly for a moment that I flinch, hands automatically pressing themselves against my stomach in an effort to feel something that does not exist.

She calls me darling and enquires after my health but I shake my head and I leave the table. I have to go to the hospital today, I have an excuse. When I reach my room I am sick in the toilet. I didn't eat anything but my body is punishing me anyway. My mother has been worrying after me, telling me that I'm getting too thin but I cannot help what my body does. I am rebelling against myself. Maybe I can fade away this time instead of catching the train.

I shut my eyes for a moment and lean my fevered brow against the cool porcelain of the toilet bowl. It is a mistake.

Every time my eyes shut, his voice, laughter, face, body, smile. He fills up my very being as loudly as he could possibly be. Kit. My Kit who has always and will always belong to me, the Kit that I have never met in my life but know better than anyone else, I swear that I really have gone insane. I'm such a sorry creature that I have made up a false hero to save me from a life that most die for.

Kit is beautiful but a dream. So entranced am I in the idea of him that I have dreamed of our life together, that he loved me. I have never met a boy named Kit in my life and the diamond on my left hand proclaims me claimed.

It is steady as a drum beat, the knowledge that I love Kit.

In my head, the name Kit has become synonymous with the idea of escape. Kit is my suicide plan, my eventual release. One day I will follow him into my dreams and I won't wake up but I will be happy there with him. I belong with him. The knowledge is concrete in my brain.

I no longer fear insanity because I must have become it so many years ago.

When I arrive at the hospital, I stand for long minutes staring at the directory although I know the place better than I know my own home. I have been in and out of it my entire life due to a number of maladies. Each and every time they could never pick up the true sickness that started in my brain during one of those many visits. I hadn't been meant to see my mother letting the young handsome doctor make his way down her neck with his lips.

I look at the sign without reading it, a feeling of sadness gripping me so tightly that I fear I cannot breath. I am struggling with it, biting my lips, eyes swimming with tears when I feel another body make contact with mine. I am pushed slightly forward by the force of it and my mouth opens in slight surprise. I breath in.

The body apologizes and I turn my head slowly, unseeing, nodding slightly in acceptance of the apology. He is taller than me, as most are. I have to look up slightly to make appropriate eye contact. I do not see him well. I am not looking very hard. I am too self-involved, too trapped in my own head.

It appears that he is headed to the same room as I am, the same therapy session that the woman who is my mother insisted that I attend along with the other trauma patients. A small piece of me is desperate to have the strangeness and sorrow within me noticed but a larger piece of me is just too exhausted to argue with my mother. So I agreed to attend and now I am here, in the hotel lobby.

I follow the boy as he walks off to find the room. It is good to have something to focus on so that I don't have to concentrate too hard. It's such a strain to. It didn't used to be so hard but everything takes so much effort now. It feels as if I am forcing myself everyday to do and think how I am meant to but I cannot. I am not me.

I don't belong here, maybe not anywhere.

I follow the boy who walked into me into the designated room and take a seat in the corner, far and hopefully unnoticed by anyone.

There are echoes lost
in the garden is anybody listening
T h e y w h i s p e r :
The ones who are only living
are the ones who are only dying