Cerebral Cage

I stand here in the wide open field of flowers tickling my ankles and shins, yet I am trapped, frozen. I do not feel the sun on my face, melting away the blues in the songs I hear.

I want to scream, nothing but air escapes my lips. Heart beating out of my chest, this is it, I think, this is the beginning of death.

"Hey, are you okay?" A voice in the distance I hear. Sirens off in the distance, coming for me.

A touch it feels so near, yet I am behind an invisible barrier of bars, that I cannot escape.

"Help me!" My mind pleads, yet I am having a hard time focusing on anything, the voice I search to find its owner. I am a prisioner inside my head. I cannot escape like a convicted felon. No I haven't done a crime, unless mental health is one. It a life sentence.

The nurse tells me that if I don't have a plan, I can leave, no help here, I've been the third time this week. At 17, I cant find any reason to be happy. I don't know if I have ever been or ever will be happy. I wish someone had an answer for me.

Everyone tells me it comes from within, but what if within is empty...how do I live everyday, hollow.

Physical scars riddle my arms and are all over my body. It shows the times I wanted to leave my body, just to find peace, can't you see I am crying for help. I have hundreds. To stop those voices in my head. I have been institutionalized, poked and pried to figure out how to get me out of here. They just don't understand. Not even my mom, or any of my family. No one can save me from myself....

***

I get the call, I see the number...I dont want to go there again. I don't want to watch them give another excuse not to help her cause they just don't have one. I am tired of pretending for her.

I am standing in the conference room looking at my daughter, she strains to communicate, I can't stand to be here. I can't imagine how she must feel. But maybe I do, I have watched my own mother and her mental health, now her. When does it end?

When can we stop pretending everything will get better, that a magic pill will fix her?

There is no magic elixir to snap her back and tell her she is every bit worthy of happiness. That she deserves to be happy, if only she looked inside and saw and opened up to the possiblity to find it within herself. I don't know the answer.

I created her in my womb, I had such big aspirations for her. I just wanted her to be happy in this life, and I can't even give that to her. My baby girl, who walked for the first time to the bathtub at nine months, she is so smart. Shes got her whole life...

Tears slide down my face, what happened to my little girl I used to embrace, before I found out she secretly cut at 12 and was depressed.

I reach out to her but I fear if I touch her, I will fall into a million shards of pain and disintegrate. I will evaporate into the atmosphere. See, here, I am trapped by my own demons, she cannot hear or see either. Abused, beaten and unloved myself. I escaped my prision, but I don't have a map to help her. I only protected her from the life I lived and somehow it doesn't matter.

I am an outsider looking in, I live in my own invisible prison.

"I am sorry, I have to go...I love you, please be okay. and get well," I whisper.

"Okay mom, thanks for coming, I know, I love you too."

I leave her sitting there with the doctors and nurses like the past 6 years, on repeat.

It is breaking my sanity, my will to keep going, to want to live; its breaking my heart...I can't breathe. I cannot keep watching this nightmare, I can't be here.

I walk fast out of the hospital and I gasp for air I cant breathe, I go into deep sobbing convulsions. I scream into the sky, "Why!?" What did she ever do to anyone deserve this!" I feel as though I am going to pass out, grief is taking over.

I sob uncontrollably, I have to detach myself from something that I grew inside of me for nine months and I dont know which is worse. All I know is I cant stay, I have been beaten abused and emotionally manipulated for my entire childhood and young adult life, I wanted to protect her from anything like this. My whole body shakes as I walk home in the rain, masking the tears that won't stop.

I dont know how to get her out of her own prison. And all the resources offered to try to help her, she refuses to try. She gives up after the first session, the counselling, the help, and keeps choosing recreational drugs or loser boyfriends instead.

Until psychosis is what she gets instead. Until all her family has to remove themselves from her, because she continues even after all of it she still takes the drugs like its her best friend, instead.

She has a new prison cell, addiction that she can't escape, and its name is maryjane. No one figured a little grass smoking would put her in the mental ward, but it did.

I wish I could say this was a fictional story too, but no. I will put this story out for the world to see, that nothing is as it seems from one home to the next.

People from the outside, the doctors, the police, the counsellors, they only see, a mom who abandoned her daughter, me; I am the monster.

I dont know if I am wrong or right by detaching myself from her story. I only know that if I don't leave now, and seperate myself from it... I will be the one who will need visiting on the 7th floor of a mental ward.