He backed up a step, obviously surprised by my outburst. “Never mind. All you have to say is it doesn’t work.”
“It’s just getting late.” Still feeling uneasy, I turned away from the mirror. “Help me get this dress off.”
Adonis helped me out of the frothy concoction of the dress, moving quickly but with enough care to ensure it didn’t rip.
He seemed a little unnerved when he caught the look on my face. “You don’t like it?”
“It’s just not right,” I lied, pushing the dress into his arms so he would hang it back up. “We’ll keep looking.”
“This is the closest thing to what you describe in the scene notes. If not this, then what did you have in mind?”
An itch had started under my skin, and all I wanted to do was get out of there. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? You’re the one who wrote it. What were you thinking when you created the character?”
“I have to go.” I didn’t wait for him to answer as I turned toward the door. “We can work on this some more next time.”
Running made me a coward. But confronting my feelings meant trying to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and I didn’t have the strength for that right now. Adonis thought of me as quirky and eccentric, but still in the general range of normal. I wanted to keep it that way.
“Seph, wait—”
But I was already shoving open the doors.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I ran away, even though it was impossible to escape what only existed in your own mind.
Chapter Two
Someone once told me that creativity was the only natural outlet for madness.
But that was just the sort of shit people said in mental hospitals.
The idea that our individual psychoses somehow entitled us to special gifts of creativity helped keep the darkness of reality at bay. It was one of the few things that made the oppressive gray walls and forced medication regimens manageable. We all liked to pretend that without the constraints of society’s labels, we would be gods among men.
Also known as delusions of grandeur, one of the things that shows up on many of the pages that I steal a look at when my chart is laid out on the table.
Maybe it was because the people in charge treated art as therapy. Crayons and paints were cheap, and our time was meaningless. Stick us all in a room with some paper and art supplies, then call it a therapeutic intervention. Sounds a lot better than warehousing.
Perhaps it was because I considered myself an artist even when my mind wasn’t going sideways, but the whole thing just kind of pissed me off.
The girl down the hall who wrote her magnum opus on strips of toilet paper while not sleeping for three days straight wasn’t a creative genius. Just manic and off her meds.
I used to believe, with every part of my soul, that I was the dark queen of the underworld. And that Hades had been my king.
My logical mind knew it couldn’t be true, but I saw his face like the clearest memory. He haunted all of my dreams.
At least, until the medication took the dreams away.
They made me paint as a condition of my release from those early stays at the hospital. Something about how it was the only way I would be able to confront my delusions and finally recognize they were false. The walls of my sad little room at the hospital eventually became covered in drawings and paintings of whatever fantastical thing I could think of: three-headed dogs with knives for teeth, creatures crawling over a mountain of bones, blood dripping from the red in the rainbow.
I let them think I was working through my “issues” when really, I made up whatever shit I thought would make them happy.
No one needed to see what I had seen.
Even if it all existed entirely in my head, and I had a team of therapists and doctors insisting precisely that, it wasn’t a risk I was willing to take. I could never fight the idea that something terrible was coming for me. The doctors didn’t understand that I yearned for them to prove it to me, make me believe that all of it was a figment of my imagination.
I wanted to be as crazy as they said I was because that was less scary than the alternative.
Every so often, they tried a different technique or altered the cocktail of chemicals I forced down my throat several times a day. But let’s be honest, the only difference between jail and the psych ward was that everyone in jail knew what they had done to get there. The locks on the doors were just as thick and the rules just as inexplicably repressive. They watched us shave our legs and stuck fingers in our mouths after we took our pills, all in the interest of safety.
Being committed just made it easier to believe that all the rules I imagined kept society in line no longer applied. It strengthened the delusion instead of convincing me that my memory was flawed.
It took months of therapy before I would even consider the idea that the underworld and its monarch had been a figment of my overactive imagination. The specialist that my guardian flew in from Switzerland insisted that the traumas of my childhood had manifested themselves in this fantasy world where I could act out all the suffering that I couldn’t remember.
He was an idiot. But at some point, I had to confront the idea that the world would never let me be unless I convinced them I didn’t believe in things that couldn’t be real. And the longer I pretended it was true and went along with them, the easier it was to actually accept the reality around me.
Eventually, I managed to convince all of us, and they let me go.
I told myself that the underworld and a literal god of death couldn’t possibly be real. I had never traveled there, barely escaping with my life and freedom. Instead, I was like Dorothy waking up after her adventures in Oz.
All of it had been only a dream.
Now, the underworld lived on only in my nightmares and in my art. And so did its master.
Hades.
Finally, after years, I accepted that he couldn’t be real.
Then it took only a moment for everything I knew about the nature of reality to crack and shatter around me like shards of glass. I’d gotten complacent, crediting myself for the creation of an entire world as if one fragile, human girl could possibly possess such power.
The doctors and nurses at the hospital worked so hard to convince me to accept reality. If only they’d known that they chose the wrong one to believe in.
My roommate, Cleo, was already home when I burst into our shared apartment. I always felt like the darkness was chasing me when the sun set, and I refused to be outside when it disappeared over the horizon.
Call it a phobia, but I knew terrible things happened in the liminal spaces, when one thing became another. Light to darkness was the most dangerous transition of them all.
Cleo didn’t seem surprised at my huffing and puffing as I shut the door behind me and locked each of the four deadbolts one by one. My antics had been on display for all three of the years we’d been living together.
She put up with me without complaint because tolerating me meant she didn’t have to pay rent.
“Diana called,” Cleo said without looking away from the television. “I’m supposed to remind you to take your meds because you haven’t picked up a new prescription for this month yet.”