Harrowed.

You're sick.
That's what I've been told since the sickness that took my mother infected me.


You're sick.
Always emphasis on the four letter word. Always in my aunt’s voice. Always in that matter of fact tone.

"No, you can't go outside. you're sick."
"You have to take this medicine, you're sick.."
“You're sick., you have to go to this appointment with Dr. Weisz."
“I don’t think it’s best if you live alone, you’re sick.

"You're sick, Charlotte."

S-I-C-K.


That damned four letter word over and over and over again, making me want to pull on my hair and scream as loud as I can.


The four letter word caging me in this hell.

I'm already dead, yet my still beating heart hasn't realized it, they haven’t realized it.


Living dead girl walking the halls.
Living dead girl reading in the library.
Living dead girl sleeping in her bed yet so far away.
Living dead girl breathing.

I’m fragile and frail.


I’m pallid and pale.


I’m broken and brittle.


All words to describe the sad, little sick girl who lives in the old house hidden in the woods.
The sick girl who knows the hospital so well that she can walk the halls with her eyes closed and not get lost.
The sick girl with the dead mother, the mad father and the love-scorned aunt who all live in the damned house.

I’m confined and constrained; caged like some sort of exotic bird to be picked and prodded by men in white coats.


"That is what she must be,” the doctors said then and say now.


What my Aunt always says, though never out loud.
No, instead she says I must be kept “safe.”
After all she knows best.

They do all they can to make it longer until the fluttering bird in the cage that is my ribs knows the truth.
Why they keep trying, I don’t know. I’m gonna die anyways, that’s the curse of being alive.
You eventually die and no amount of medicine or prodding is going to stop it.

“Shield her away in the house near the little lakeside town. The house her mother grew up in.
It'll be good for her. It’ll be safe and she’ll get better.”
But I didn’t get better, it wasn’t safe and it wasn’t good for me. Wasn’t good for my Mother either, but we don’t talk about that.



They knew. The people who live in the town. They tried to warn them, tried to make them see.
My Aunt laughed.
She didn't believe in ghosts, still doesn’t despite it all.

"There is nothing beyond this, this is the only life you get."

Wrong, Dear Aunt. 

So freaking wrong.

There is something else beyond the veil.
You don't have to look far either.


Just look in the mirror. See your reflection warp into a scream. 
Trick of the light of course.

Stand still long enough. And you can hear them whisper to you.
Just the wind, that's all.

At night, piano music drifts down the halls, it isn't me.

Pass it off as a symptom. I have many of those.

Cuts and bruises on my fragile shell.
Not from bumping into the door, or tripping on the stairs. Not what I tell you.

They're not all bad though.
There is some who are kind to me.
That treat me more like a person than you do.
Your fragile china doll.

You wouldn't believe me if I told you the truth, Aunt.


So I won't even bother. 
Even though I know you can feel it too.