I never saw Cynthia again.

Mother walked me in and registered me. The receptionist was a plump, fat woman with her upper lip permanently curled into a sneer.

I guess working with crazy people did that to you.

"Yes?" she asked, as if she'd been sleeping and Mother had woken her up.

"This is Mary Alice Brandon. She's a new patient," Mother explained.

"Go down the hall and make a right, then take the next two lefts," the receptionist directed. "That's her room. I'll walk with you."

Then why did you bother giving us directions? I wondered, but I didn't say anything. I wanted to appear quiet, tame, sensible.

We followed her like sheep. She opened my room and ushered me in. I took a tentative step in.

As soon as I had a toe in the room, the receptionist shut the door and locked it.

I was immersed in total darkness. I had seen the room for a microsecond and was now wishing I could remember it.

I tried to feel for the light switch. Surely there had to be one, right? But no. I spent some time - could have been a minute, could have been a year - looking for one.

I moved my hands up and down every inch of the wall. Nothing.

Okay, I thought, trying not to panic, that's all right. I just need to find everything.

Through three of the five senses (omitting taste and touch) I located the toilet, bed, and all four walls.

The room was exceedingly, almost cruelly sparse. There was a small cot in the center of the room that served as a bed, a toilet, and a sink.

The sink barely worked, but I strived to use it almost every day. Who knew what kind of people had been in this room before?

I looked around, trying to force my eyes to adjust, but nothing worked. It was only very gradually that my eyes started to see the varying shades of gray. It could have been several years for all I knew.

I thought I was in hell, at least until they started the shock treatment and I learned the real definition of hell.

My eyes had only just adjusted when the doctor opened the door. The flash of light was blinding, like someone waving a flashlight in your eyes the minute you wake up.

"My name is Dr. Veravaz," he declared. "Is this Mary Alice Brandon?"

The words came out sharp and bitter. "What's it to you?"

I saw him smirk a little. "Excellent. Come, come," he directed.

There is nothing quite like electroconvulsive therapy. First, they hooked me up to a frightening machine. It was made of metal, and it sent chills down my spine.

Next, Dr. Veravaz flicked a switch, and gasoline lit through my veins. Fire coursing through my body. A shock like none you've ever felt before.

For the final step, they wheeled me on the gurney back to my room, still feeling the tremors of the shock.

Teeth chattering, face burning, I lay in the middle of my room. My arms jerked, my legs contorted.

I lost all control of my mind and body. I could feel, as if in a parallel universe, my limbs seizing up, but I couldn't do anything to stop it.

You would think that you could eventually euthanize yourself to the pain, fall asleep, or at least get used to it. No. Every movement, every sensation was renewed every single time.

I didn't know how long I stayed in the asylum. Eventually, I lost count of the number of times they administered shock treatment.

Don't get me wrong; I tried to count. I wanted to give myself a lot of things to remember, so I wouldn't forget what mattered most.

But some days, I'd wake up and try to recall what number I'd been at yesterday. Twenty-eight, right? Or was it twenty-nine? It was less than thirty, I knew that. I think.

Eventually, I gave it up altogether. I made the conscious decision to stop counting, because I wanted to regain some control.

With everything that a human experiences, people want to know what was the best and worst part of it. Whether it was summer camp or shock therapy, everyone liked to arrange things from least to greatest.

There was no best part of electroconvulsive treatment. Everything was the worst of its category. Each seizure was worse than the one before; all the shocks were more horrible lightning shocks than the previous ones.

But perhaps even worse than the shock therapy was the thought of being totally alone.

When I had nothing better to do, I paced through my whole room, running my hands over every square inch of wall. There was no light switch.

I had found the doorway within...well, a short amount of time. I think. I couldn't really tell much of anything.

Anyway, what I was saying was, I'd found the door. It locked from the inside.

So Dr. Veravaz was intent on keeping his patients trapped in a black abyss.

That was not fine with me, but I couldn't do much to stop it. At the age of...seven, I thought...I had come to realize an important life truth. There was no need to worry about things I was powerless to change.

Still, it irked me to be locked up for nearly half my life. Oh, what was I talking about? It irked me to be in this place to begin with. Everything else was just a triviality.

Sometimes I tried to escape. I took the sink off its hook and tried to crawl through the pipe. I took the bed and made a battering ram and banged it into the side wall.

Nothing. My visions never even changed.

I didn't know if the asylum had cured/robbed me of my powers, or if it was just my destiny to stay in it for the rest of my life.

Whatever the reason, I could no longer see myself anywhere but here.

It was sometimes frightening, but not often. The shock treatment didn't get any better, but I didn't expect it to. The lonesomeness never ceased, but I developed some resistance to it.

Sometimes I talked to myself, just to hear my own voice. But I didn't do it a lot. Only when I was desperate for some humanity.

Most of the time, though, I just slept or thought or sat idly.

What did I think about? Everything. I tried to calculate my age, with little success. Had I spent a year here or ten? A week or a century?

I couldn't even tell. I didn't really care. What did it matter? I was going to die here, whether I was eight or eighty-eight.

One day I tried to look at myself during the shock treatments, to determine my age.

I was short, perhaps 5' 2". I was too skinny to tell if I had any shape at all. My hair was the color of Coca-Cola and wildly tangled.

From that day on, I decided I was seventeen. I didn't really know why I picked that age. I had heard that it was a wonderful age, full of blooming and promise and celebration.

So I picked an age. I didn't know why and I didn't know when and I certainly didn't if I was right.

I just had to wait and see.

Hellow to my fans, as few as they may be! Okay, for this chapter, I want THREE reviews before I post the next chapter. Thanks!