Elusive Reality - Prologue

PROLOGUE

Maricopia County Mental Health Institute - 2006

I had never known loneliness like this before. It was cold and damp here. The six by nine space felt like it got smaller every day. There is a small rectangle window near the ceiling. I can see the clouds out of it, but that is all. It is too high to reach. The walls are made of cement blocks that had been painted white some time ago. The paint was chipping. There were silver hooks at the top, middle and bottom of the walls. I imagined they would hold the padding, should I ever become violent and try to hurt myself.

I have been in this hell hole for months now and I have never left this room, and nobody has ever entered it. At least I had my own bathroom, if you could call it that. It wasn’t much, just a toilet, a small stainless steel sink and a tiny stand up shower stall. I didn’t even have a mirror. I often wondered about how grotesque I had become. I remember being fond of hair products and lipgloss. They didn’t allow me to use a razor. I couldn’t shave my legs, or anything for that matter. It was truly disgusting.

Some underpaid orderly person routinely pushed my medication and meals through a rectangle space in the window of my door. The person always stood there, staring at me through the glass window of the door and watched me swallow my medicine. When I was finished I had had to show her the inside of my mouth and lift my tongue. After I did that, the person disappeared. They never cared if I ate or not, only that my medication went down.

Someone would come by and pick up the tray that my meal had arrived on precisely forty minutes after it was delivered. They didn’t allow me to have a watch or a clock. I counted the seconds for an entire week to arrive at my conclusion regarding meal times. Thirty minutes was allotted for breakfast and lunch and forty minutes for diner and medication.

Tonight, like last night, I only pretended to swallow my medication. While my head was back, I quickly used my tongue to lodge the two little blue pills between my gums and my cheek. I graciously slid the little plastic cup through the rectangle space in the door and smiled. Once the orderly had moved on to the next room, I spit the pills out and put them in the toilet. I find that I can remember him better if I don’t take my medication. Him. It made me sad to think of his name, although I was glad it came to me so easily today. Edward Cullen. The love of my life, or so I thought.

I really didn’t know what to believe anymore. Most days I had to look at the band around my wrist to remember my own name. Isabella Marie Swan. On days like these in which I was absent of the medicated haze, and I could remember him so clearly, I truly believed he was real and not a figment of my imagination, or my illness. I must be really mentally ill to conjure up someone as magnificent as him in my mind. But, like they said, if he was real, why had he never come to see me here. Why had he never looked for me? Why didn’t he write to me? He never existed, says my mother; says everyone.

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