Chapter 1: Black symbols.
Ariela looked at the piece of paper in front of her. The letters on it engraving themselves into her eyes.
She wanted to close her eyes but she couldn’t. She just tightened the grip on the pen she was holding in her hand. Her poor sweaty hand now.
She started selecting and writing things on the piece of paper after some time. Thoughts that swirled in her head now engraved on the white sheet.
“My dad was an alcoholic. He often came back from work and my mom always hid me under my bed.”
She wrote. Before looking at what she has just written and dazzling it over with ink.
Covering it completely.
“Why do i even have to do this miss?” Ariela asked with a defeated and exhausted tone.
The woman in front of her. Sitting in front of the desk looked at her with a patient glare. She was dressed in elegant clothing. Far better than Ariela worn out stuff.
“It will help. Pouring it all out.” The woman said with almost robotic tone.
Ariela just sighed and looked at the piece of paper again. And wrote something else.
“I feel like i dont know who i am. I look in the mirror and i see someone else. Not a woman. Not a man. Perhaps a figure that looks like a human. I feel like i forgot my own face. And how I understand nothing at the same time.”
Ariela looked at the text. And her head just tilted. Despite pouring out her shower thoughts. She felt like the text was melodic. It was. Nice in its own way.
She handed the sheet to her doctor.
And she looked at it. Seemingly analyzing it. “Do you often feel like you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror?” She asked, looking up from the sheet of paper and back at Ariela.
Ariela felt like writing that created just more problems than it solved.
“Miss. That’s not what I wanted to convey, I think…” She says, now unsure herself about if she maybe did mean that she really doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror.
The woman nods and looks at the clock. “So what is it then?” She asks again.
Ariela just sits in her chair. Looking at the woman in front of her. And her mouth is shut for a couple of minutes. Before the patience of the doctor wears off.
“Let’s get to something else.” She said and gave Ariela another sheet of paper. This one had boxes she had to check out. Weirdly it was her favorite action to do on those.
And that’s how her third visit this month went. Same checking out boxes. Same verdict.
“You suffer from heavy depression.”
And the same prescription for another box of medication that will try to make her happy.
Walking out of the office into the white hallways of the familiarity she took a deep sigh. She saw this corridor so many times in such different angles she remembered every single stain on the wall even though nobody else seemed to see them.
She looked at them as she passed. Some said it added texture. But Ariela seemingly hated them. Just discarding the imperfection of the white clinical white.
She passed other people. Seemingly in a similar situation to hers. Yet so much differently. She didn’t understand why half of them were there. They probably had it easy. Their clothes are so well kept. Their attention focused on their small devices they called Smartphones.
It was alien to her. How could somebody look into a screen for more than an hour? What could possibly be there.
She took the bus back home. Sitting on her favorite spot. The right side, near the window on the back. Almost all the way back.
She liked to look at the road she was driving on. Well the bus was rolling on. She personally was too scared to drive because she would probably do something bad the second you gave her the control of a two tons worth of steel.
The seat was comfy to her too. Sturdy and stiff but she liked it. Not overly soft like other seats on the bus.
“Wheat Fields Lieutenant Street.”
The announcer exclaimed. And Ariela took off her seat mechanically and stepped off the bus into the quiet outskirts of her home town. It was still away from the suburbia but it was the cheaper part of town. She could afford a small apartment there at least.
Walking into her apartment the stale smell of Urine hit her immediately. She already got used to it. She didn’t even know why it was this way. It just was.
She did try to keep the thing clean to a level where she could function. But yet it felt like it was still too much for her sometimes.
She ignored everything around her though. And just planted herself on the bed.
Where she picked up a book. The one she had been putting away in the middle of all of her other novels. The one that the cover was really boring and she got it as a gift. And she read the first page.
It was off putting. The text was uninteresting. The stakes were missing. And the story was a snooze fest. But she kept reading. She didn’t have anything else to read and she really didn’t want to read the same fantasy for the third time. Where everything always ended well. And every loss had a victory afterwards.
She had read the whole book. And closing it. She noticed it was dark. The day passed and she had read the entire thing.
She looked at the cover once more. And she realized that the cover was a mirror. It didn’t need anything special. Because she saw herself in the book.
She realized. That she was reading her own Biography. A diary she forgot she wrote. A book written about her. About how she fell and never came back up.
And she didn’t understand why she had the opportunity to read this particular book. She felt like she understood less than before. Yet she felt weirdly compelled. Compelled to maybe give a small smile before she got knocked off to sleep.
