White Walls

                                                                                WHITE WALLS

What is the purpose of life? Yet another question to be answered hung around the four desolate walls. I looked at the ceiling, the stark white so painstakingly bright. Nothing in this room that I lived for 19 years made me happy. Maybe once it might have excited me, enthralled me, yet now the plain walls, always bare to my examination brought me nothing but dullness. It tore me apart to look at the never changing walls. The need to change it clawed at me begging to be let out, yet I stood firm. I stood up and faced the only mirror in the room. I examined myself. I looked like how I did yesterday yet so different. I didn’t have the scratch marks on my face yesterday. Neither the black eye nor the bruise near my jaw. A week forth new ones would replace them. Misery overtook me again. The need to change clung to me. Funny, how 19 years of solitude can affect a person. I have swum in the extreme depths of my heightened mind and discovered things buried in the deepest holes of my mind. I remember the cold air on me as the doctor pulled me out of my mother’s warm cocoon, the feeling of profound happiness as I finally learned to walk, the quiet submission I felt towards my strict teacher in nursery, the courage for rebellion in middle school, the insolence towards my parents in high school…… Maybe tomorrow my parents will come to take me away from here. I don’t know why they locked me up. This place scares me.  At the dead of the night they come when everyone sleeps, to scratch and hurt me. I’d scream and scream but no one would ever come. I think back to the time when my parents tucked me in and read me a story and kissed me on my forehead. Now the only contact comes from my assailants who seem to be the only people who remember me. I no longer feel cherished or loved for. No one will cry for me when I die. My mom lied when she told me I would be remembered by the world. No one knows I exist nor do they care. I was not unique; I was just as mundane as those white walls I memorized. Not a crack has escaped me and its insignificance haunts me as if my own…….

 The news will start at precisely 7 am and just as I predicted the once blank TV filled with color. It doesn’t attract me; the world is not as I knew it. It upsets me to find the violence outshining the good. Where is the alternative world for which I pray for? Tears prick my eyes, just like that Merida, my cat, jumps on my lap and I stroke at her fur. Pleased by my attention she purrs contently. I remember when she’d scratch anyone who’d come near her. My eyes fell on the walls again. I looked around searching for something, anything, and I finally found my salvation…. a black marker on the desk. I took and opened the cap and stood there in front of the wall perched forward to write. My hands quivered, my breathing became shallow and sweat dripped down my forehead. I touched the nib of my marker to wall and wrote.

Behind the one way mirror stood two people; a doctor & a teenage girl.  “What happened to her? What is she doing?” the teenager asked. Your parents’ death affected her a great deal. It changed her from the happy- go- lucky teen to a Schizophrenic patient at a mental hospital. One who believes she’s been here for 19 years, when she’s only been here for one year and has a cat called Merida. One who watches an imaginary TV and cries for imaginary news. Every day she screams for help at night and harms herself. We’ve tried to make her stop yet she attacks anyone who restrains her when she harms herself. I’m showing you why you cannot take her home. She completely lost touch with reality.

“But she’s my sister. I cannot let her live like this. She’s all I’ve left”

The doctor was silent for some time before he said, “You asked me what she was doing, right ? Well, she’s writing ‘WHITE WALLS’ ”      

 “But Doctor, walls are blue” the confused teen said.    

 “EXACTLY”.