The Mirrorverse
Chapter 11

Maya

The house is silent, I’m sitting on the sofa and there is no-one around. My parents are in bed upstairs slumbering the deep sleep of the oblivious. I feel numb and dopey from all the pills forced into me on psychiatrist’s orders. They don’t stop the visions, nothing stops them. They don’t stop the pain when I am tortured by forces I cannot even describe.

The doctors say the scars are self-inflicted. They choose to disbelieve the truth, but who could believe it? Today, I was freed from the institution they keep me locked away in. And this day is to be the last day of my life. The kitchen knives have been hidden away in my parent’s bedroom for fear of what I could do to myself, so instead I have a pair of scissors and a disposable razor.

I am extracting the flimsy blade from the moulded plastic by lamplight, and it is a long way from dawn on this winter’s night. The house is warm, and Christmas cards cover every surface, from the mantelpiece to my piano. A pair of sepia wolf’s eyes stare down at me from above the fireplace, the last to regard me in this life.

I am desperately hoping that this is the only life, that when I draw the blade across my wrist, I will wither and die under the lupine gaze, and will know no more for the rest of eternity. I need it to be over, I need life to dissipate as fast as it started, I need to no longer suffer. I need not be told that I am crazy because I am dragged around to other worlds and subjected to the whims of their inhabitants. I need not be forced to have injections of antipsychotics which make me hazy and fat. I don’t want to dread what is around the next corner, or what fate has in store for me next. I am broken, losing touch with what is real and what isn’t. I am tired of looking over my shoulder, tired of this half-life I have been forced to exist in.

My stomach sinks as the last layer of my will to live surfaces at the fear of this not ending. I recollect the nightmares where I die, only to wake in another life. Sometimes it is in hell, other times it is to exist for eternity, just another type of hell. I’ve been to hell, I know what it feels like. I need to sleep. Forever.

I try not to think of my parents asleep upstairs, try not to think how they’ll feel. This is my journey. It would be selfish for them to ask me to go on like this.

I hold the small shard of metal in my hand, proffering my left wrist for its pleasure. A razor is made to cut, and this blade fulfils its destiny as it slices deep into my wrist. It is going across it, since nobody is likely to replace me. I need not make it harder for them to put me back together.

The pain is exquisite, then gone. I feel nothing as I lie there on the sofa, watching the blood flow. It occurs to me that I will ruin the sofa which makes me laugh out loud at the irony. A ruined sofa for a ruined life. Like anyone will care for either.

I start to feel cold, and my eyes close. Finally, the end is near. I can still hear the fridge whirring away in the background as I worry about life carrying on. I feel like I am at the top of a roller-coaster, strapped in and waiting to drop. My expectant terror is not of dying, but of continuing. My worst fear cannot come true. I am fading away, I can no longer hear anything. The blackness is taking me, my thoughts are slowing down. Slowing...

Maya sat bolt upright in bed, her heart racing and covered in sweat. She kept telling herself that she was alive, it wasn’t real, was just a dream. Her recurring nightmare of late was so vivid, and never changed. That was her parent’s house and those hands were hers. Those thoughts were also hers, not even dissociated from her dreaming self. Maya died over and over again, the same dream every night. She sighed and hoped the nightmare would not return as the folds of sleep enveloped her.