Monday, December 29, 2003
And the beginning begins...
Bed. Up against wall. Near window. Small window, but it doesn't matter really. She's lost enough weight here. Everyone seems small and frail, as if the very essence of life is beaten out of them. Or at least nutritonally sucked out of them...Hospital food.
Bed. Near window.
Hide the sheets. But now unhidden. Roped, tied, becoming rope. It took awhile. Lots of things have gone on while she was forced to regroup. Ideas. The mortals. The Immortals. The Shadows. For who I am, she thought, they know who and what I am and what my purpose may be. But only the souls of the dead would tell her...and only in exquisite imagery.
No more "Does not play well with others."
Bed. Near window. No bars. Window opens.
The smell of the air.
But she works quickly and feverishly to free herself. Rope through window. After lights out. Bed near window, suitable anchor. Sturdy. Heavier than she is. Through window, toughest part. Solitary, if she is discovered. If not...Heaven. They are out there, with their portals, Black Jacket et al, and she will find them and steal away if she has to. To another Time, another Planet, if she has to. Anything. To get away from "Does not play well with others". Slide down rope. Carefully. In some dark place in her mind, she does mourn her own people. What they have become. It is sad.
And then her feet touch the glorious earth, the beginning and the end. So that which we shall rise from, she thinks, so shall we will poison. The earth, the ground, and the feet take flight. She is running from the shackles of society. Yards to the Tall Grass, then to Fence, then to Graveyard. And from there, who knows. Running is all she can think of at the present moment. Wading through grass. Hopefully, to freedom.
It amazed her, when all was said and done. How easy it was to convice the laundry boy to bring her a white skirt. How easy it was to convice the kitchen staff to give her a packet of drink mix. How easy that the refreshing childhood drink dyed the white skirt red. It's all in the obvious, she had thought. And she had been right.
It was years -- decades, actually -- before she ever cracked a book open about this. And even in the old, terse language she once knew, it was amazing to see how history presented her. A Genius. For breaking out of one the most secure mental institutions of her day. Of course, the encyclopedia entry showed its age; it was written years after the judgement had been overturned. But that had only been out of knowledge, after the Blind War. Which she said would happen, if she were here to add that part. She told them the truth; her kindness and willingness to save humanity from itself had not been appreciated in her time. She knew this, though, and never gave the consequences of her actions a second thought. To doubt would have meant to ponder, and to ponder would have meant that she would die there, a sad and sorry soul, like the rest, devoid of the reason that she was who she was. Not a Looney Prophet, as history reinvented her, but a person whose real people ran from the mortals, Immortals, and more importantly, the Shadows, of which she was a part of. Later, she would learn there was reason of her torture, but at this time, at the moment of escape, she had no clue of the real danger that threatened her sanity. It was not the therepists, the people, or anything to with Earth.
Run. Running. The air. She was at the Fence. If one knew how to secretly sharpen things...oh, like a pair of knives that could be fashioned into scissors, then one had the key, so to speak, of getting past the fence. Stupid people. Tall grass next to fence, providing cover. For soothing, they would say, but not really knowing -- or thinking -- that one could use it as cover to get away. That had been humanity's failing -- not to think through every decision that was made and its sister companions, the implications of such decisions. This would have been something she would have earlier cursed; now, she welcomed it with open arms, since it worked to her advantage. She was through the Fence. Now to Graveyard.
That was the wrong part of the plan. For humans, or even partial humans, plans will go awry.
She ran. It took a minute to realize that her feet hit concrete instead of grass and headstones. For a moment she was in horror; they paved the cemetary with an apartment building! But it did prove something to her advantage. One, the graveyard had been relocated a block from where she stood; Two, someone had left traditionally female clothing on a clothesline spanning one of the porches of the complex. The clothing didn't entirely fit, but she made do with it.
Crazy Girl made her way to graveyard. If left to the many books that devoted their pages to her disappearance, she vanished into thin air. Abducted by aliens. Taken to the Caribbean by CIA agents. Fell into an open grave and was accidentally buried. No one really knew what happened. When the cities glowed in their nuclear winter, no one cared. When civilization began again, people came up with different but equally looney ideas. But it boils down to the fact that no one knew what had acutally happened.
For Crazy Girl, the craziess was about to begin. She had no idea that for all of her paranoid delusions, she hadn't been far from truth. And this truth would never be believed. But as the Shadows believed that were many versions of the truth that could exist, she knew there were only the truths of her perceptions.
So in the graveyard, she activated the portal, the one from her dreams, and stepped through, to another world that was just as crazy as the one she just left....
Bed. Up against wall. Near window. Small window, but it doesn't matter really. She's lost enough weight here. Everyone seems small and frail, as if the very essence of life is beaten out of them. Or at least nutritonally sucked out of them...Hospital food.
Bed. Near window.
Hide the sheets. But now unhidden. Roped, tied, becoming rope. It took awhile. Lots of things have gone on while she was forced to regroup. Ideas. The mortals. The Immortals. The Shadows. For who I am, she thought, they know who and what I am and what my purpose may be. But only the souls of the dead would tell her...and only in exquisite imagery.
No more "Does not play well with others."
Bed. Near window. No bars. Window opens.
The smell of the air.
But she works quickly and feverishly to free herself. Rope through window. After lights out. Bed near window, suitable anchor. Sturdy. Heavier than she is. Through window, toughest part. Solitary, if she is discovered. If not...Heaven. They are out there, with their portals, Black Jacket et al, and she will find them and steal away if she has to. To another Time, another Planet, if she has to. Anything. To get away from "Does not play well with others". Slide down rope. Carefully. In some dark place in her mind, she does mourn her own people. What they have become. It is sad.
And then her feet touch the glorious earth, the beginning and the end. So that which we shall rise from, she thinks, so shall we will poison. The earth, the ground, and the feet take flight. She is running from the shackles of society. Yards to the Tall Grass, then to Fence, then to Graveyard. And from there, who knows. Running is all she can think of at the present moment. Wading through grass. Hopefully, to freedom.
It amazed her, when all was said and done. How easy it was to convice the laundry boy to bring her a white skirt. How easy it was to convice the kitchen staff to give her a packet of drink mix. How easy that the refreshing childhood drink dyed the white skirt red. It's all in the obvious, she had thought. And she had been right.
It was years -- decades, actually -- before she ever cracked a book open about this. And even in the old, terse language she once knew, it was amazing to see how history presented her. A Genius. For breaking out of one the most secure mental institutions of her day. Of course, the encyclopedia entry showed its age; it was written years after the judgement had been overturned. But that had only been out of knowledge, after the Blind War. Which she said would happen, if she were here to add that part. She told them the truth; her kindness and willingness to save humanity from itself had not been appreciated in her time. She knew this, though, and never gave the consequences of her actions a second thought. To doubt would have meant to ponder, and to ponder would have meant that she would die there, a sad and sorry soul, like the rest, devoid of the reason that she was who she was. Not a Looney Prophet, as history reinvented her, but a person whose real people ran from the mortals, Immortals, and more importantly, the Shadows, of which she was a part of. Later, she would learn there was reason of her torture, but at this time, at the moment of escape, she had no clue of the real danger that threatened her sanity. It was not the therepists, the people, or anything to with Earth.
Run. Running. The air. She was at the Fence. If one knew how to secretly sharpen things...oh, like a pair of knives that could be fashioned into scissors, then one had the key, so to speak, of getting past the fence. Stupid people. Tall grass next to fence, providing cover. For soothing, they would say, but not really knowing -- or thinking -- that one could use it as cover to get away. That had been humanity's failing -- not to think through every decision that was made and its sister companions, the implications of such decisions. This would have been something she would have earlier cursed; now, she welcomed it with open arms, since it worked to her advantage. She was through the Fence. Now to Graveyard.
That was the wrong part of the plan. For humans, or even partial humans, plans will go awry.
She ran. It took a minute to realize that her feet hit concrete instead of grass and headstones. For a moment she was in horror; they paved the cemetary with an apartment building! But it did prove something to her advantage. One, the graveyard had been relocated a block from where she stood; Two, someone had left traditionally female clothing on a clothesline spanning one of the porches of the complex. The clothing didn't entirely fit, but she made do with it.
Crazy Girl made her way to graveyard. If left to the many books that devoted their pages to her disappearance, she vanished into thin air. Abducted by aliens. Taken to the Caribbean by CIA agents. Fell into an open grave and was accidentally buried. No one really knew what happened. When the cities glowed in their nuclear winter, no one cared. When civilization began again, people came up with different but equally looney ideas. But it boils down to the fact that no one knew what had acutally happened.
For Crazy Girl, the craziess was about to begin. She had no idea that for all of her paranoid delusions, she hadn't been far from truth. And this truth would never be believed. But as the Shadows believed that were many versions of the truth that could exist, she knew there were only the truths of her perceptions.
So in the graveyard, she activated the portal, the one from her dreams, and stepped through, to another world that was just as crazy as the one she just left....
