It's days and days that go by like wandering, suffocating angels, staring as different girls go by, or the rats salute you when the guards aren't looking. Somehow everything is the same, every day no different from the rest, and you are no different, either. You are another face, another body who bleeds.
But you don't even cry anymore. The horrible things you see, the horrible ways they touch you, nothing is new anymore, and a death in the Asylum is like tea everywhere else.
Tea. How you miss it. How you would do almost anything, anything, for a steaming cup of delicious tea. For a moment when there's no Quarantine to be thrown into, no giant vats of ice-cold "hydrotherapy," no leeches to suck out your life.
Death is around every corner and all you want is to be able to breathe, like a living person.
The living don't even bleed like this.
Sure, there will be those who keep you company. Any woman would end up here, in times like these; she'll be your wife or daughter or friend, your lover or enemy, your sister or prostitute. She'll be faceless, nameless, called by her cell number, or a nickname that the Striped Stocking Society gave her in an attempt to bring life back into the black-and-white writhing stripes on the walls. She'll be dead in a month, in a year, in a day, and no one will remember her.
Despite seeing it happen to everyone, with no discrimination, somehow it feels surreal, still. Somehow you expect it to avoid you; you expect fate to bow down in front of you and submit, even as you lie on the same tables as everyone else and have your body invaded like everyone else and bleed, like everyone else. Somehow, sitting in the Opheliac gallery with flowers in your hair and your face painted, somehow having a miscarriage like everyone else still doesn't bring it home.
But you have control of your life—or, rather, you have control over whether you have life or not. Dr. Stockhilll will ask you if you thought of taking your own life. "Others have done it," he'd pointed out, but you just look at him.
There is always a point to something. There's a reason you are still here, as the Captain whispers something under her breath to you, as you slurp the nearly inedible soup, as you attempt to untangle your long red locks. "Valentine," they'll call you, from the heart-shaped burn scar on your cheek; "Whore," they'll call you, during the rape they subject you to.
Breathe, you will pray, longing for the skies to open up and the rain to pour down.
Somewhere, you think to yourself. Somewhere, somehow, there's hope.
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Yes, I read the book.
~Wings~