The Beginning
I lived back in the early 1900's. I was born in 1901 in Biloxi, Mississippi. I lived with my mother, father, and my baby sister, Cynthia. We were doing alright, living comfortably in the middle class. My parents did the best they could, and for a while, life was good. I used to play with my little sister, she was only five at the time I left. My father loved spoiling us, and he and my mother did as much as they could to keep us happy. We were happy. I loved my life, my family, and my few friends, mother discouraged me from spending too much time at another girls' house. She told me it wasn't safe, mainly around their parents because they would know there was something wrong with me. I would get this look on my face and just stare, at things that weren't there. My parents worried often about me. I had a gift, I could see the future, bits and pieces, the paths people were on as they were on them. I was told and taught to keep it hidden from others, thus I find myself in a horrid place. For you see, people would find me to be insane. No one understood the gift, no one understood me, and no one tolerated it.
It started to get worse and happened more often, I'd wake up in the middle of the night, screaming at some of the things I'd seen. My parents took me to get checked out, they'd hope they'd find a medicine to help me sleep better at least. After that, I don't know, everything came down, tumbling down. The gift hadn't always been so pronounced, as I got older and closer to puberty it happened more often. In the time spent with the doctor he noticed the strange things about me. The doctor told them he could fix me, but that I would need to be institutionalized. At the age of twelve I was placed into an asylum, or Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, they actually dropped the asylum part and changed it to hospital a few years before my admission, as if it made it a difference.
I HATED IT. It had the most awful smell, the smell of death. The building was always either way too quiet or far too loud. During the night I would hear people screaming down the hall. One time, amongst the first weeks there, I got up to see what was happening, although soon after I quickly wished I hadn't. I stood in the doorway and watched as they hooked up this woman to these monitors and she was being shocked, electroucuted. She had this blood hurdling scream and she was shaking uncontrollably on the table. Her head kept hitting against the table in violent thrusts. It was a horrendous image.
A nurse was passing by and she stopped when she saw me, her eyes widened sensing my distress, and she led me back to my night I tried to sleep while holding my hands up to cover my ears, trying desperately to block out the noise. The method didn't work as well as I'd hoped. My 'curse,' as I used to call it, allowed me to see what would happen to that woman, whether I heard it or not. I didn't fall asleep that night, how could I? This is when I came to the realization, "this is what Hell must be like."
