Fan Fiction ❯ White Rabbit ❯ Chapter 1

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

White Rabbit
by Marie Lesure/Odango In Black
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>It was a rather slow decent. She didn't know quite WHEN she had tripped and begun to fall, but she was certain that she had done it quite some time ago. It was much darker now, darker than when she had started. Everything was pale, a blueish haze veiled her bloodshot eyes. They thought she hadn't caught on, but she knew.<

I was seventeen and a senior in high school. I had no plans for college, no plans for a house, no plans for a job or a career or living expenses. At the rate I was going, am going, I'd be thirty-five and living in my parents' basement. Well, I would. If they had one. But as you can see, my life and plans for it were and are fairly pathetic. That was my problem; I'd no idea how to run a life, not mine, not anyone's. Hell, I still don't. But I digress.
If anyone's to understand my story, we'll be needing some background, will we not? Although it's not likely to be understood anyway, I think some background would be helpful so as to make it a bit less confusing.
My life has always been pretty damn good. Good parents, good school record, good friends. Well, maybe not that last one, until I was about thirteen. But I shouldn't complain, that's actually fairly good; there are people who go through whole lives without a real friend. I suppose I should count myself lucky. I suppose I do. Although I was never popular and never close to being such, once I hit high school I built myself a fairly good following. I even had groups of friends; my middle school group, my theatre group, my honors group. And I'll be damned if it wasn't the best time of my life. Fuck being an individual, people liked me!
Then my junior year rolled around and things began to slip. I'd had serious problems with depression since I was twelve, and I had had it under control until sixteen happened. Sweet sixteen my ass, I say. My depression got progressively worse and the farther I fell, the darker it got. At first the despair was overwhelming, and slowly I drew into a little blank space where I just stopped caring. It hurt too much to cry, it hurt too much to laugh, it hurt too much to feel, so I just turned it all off. It worked, for a while.
Then, one fine day, something broke through. It was a tiny, tiny voice in the back of my head. Ever read Horton Hears A Who? Like that. Only in the end, no one heard the Whos but me. It grew ever louder, and soon it brought friends. Lots of them. At first they weren't understandable, listening to them was like trying to tune in to a nonexistent radio station. My own personal talk radio station, DJs and all.
Gee, aren't I special.
But eventually I passed the hill that came between me and the transmittor, and slowly it got clearer, albeit somewhat quieter. The little voices began to form personalities, identities, and more frighteningly, faces. They taunted me, insulted me, shamed me, coming up with and teaching me improved ways to hate my already despisable self.
Oh, the fun we had.
When you have hallucinations, all of the lines in your world become blurred. There are no boundaries and nothing is real. My cereal bowl could be a time bomb, my little brother a spy for the government. The terror was overwhelming; everyone and everything around me was a threat. When you have no one to trust, you have no one to confide in, and you're left alone to fester in emotional wounds that will never scar over. I was lost in an incoherent nightmare devoid of color, and light, and love. People were all around me, but I was completely alone. I don't really know how I dealt with all of this, but I do know I became increasingly paranoid. This, needless to say, drove off just about every friend I'd made.
In the end, I was left with my original group from middle school. Plus a boyfriend. I don't quite understand what he thought he saw in me.
I didn't tell anyone what was going on, and, therefore, suffered in silence. Ah, the irony. Let us pause as we laugh at my clever use of words.
My emotions had come flooding back with reckless abandon, the good drowned out by the bad. Every night I cried myself to sleep. I needed to scream, I needed to break something, but I was too afraid I'd upset my family. Finally, one evening, something in me snapped. I ran into the kitchen, frantic, screaming through drawers and cupbords, trying to find anything I could hurt myself with. The emotional pressure was just too great; I had to get it out somehow and this was all that I could think of. I found one of my mother's knives. One of the good ones, almost like you see on the commercials, only cheaper. I took it to my room, and we stared at each other for a while, my voices just daring me to do it, mocking me, saying that I would never have the gall to go through with it.
I had to prove them wrong.
I still remember how easily it cut through my arm once I applied the right amount of pressure. I wasn't used to pain, I hated it, and it fucking hurt like hell. But it felt good. I laughed as I saw the little red ribbon blossom from my wrist. I didn't know why I chose to cut there, as I had no intention of killing myself. But, now that I think back on it, I realize that, perhaps, subliminally, I did. As I cut, my arm twitched, reflexively trying to get away. I did my best to hold it still. Once I was satisfied, I switched arms. There was a perverse feeling of ecstasy that rushed through me as I watched myself bleed, and the only thought running through my head was that it was the most beautiful fucking thing I had ever seen.
After a while, the cuts just stopped hurting and I could hardly feel the blood on my arms. I'd like to say that it killed me, but if it had, well, I wouldn't be here to tell you all of this, now would I?
Just my fucking luck.
I don't quite know how I really survived, what with all the blood I lost. My mom the hot shot nurse must have found me and done something. I was probably taken to a hospital. I really don't remember. I was much too far out of it.
It's really sick, but I wish I'd have seen the look on her face when she found me, lying there in a pool of my own blood as it saturated the carpet, the knife we'd used together so many times to cut tomatoes when we wanted to make tacos, now covered by a different type of red.
I'm a terrible, terrible person.
My parents wouldn't let me out of their sight after that. I should have been grateful that they cared, but instead I was pissed that they hadn't just let me die. So I was selfish. I didn't give a flying fuck.
It wasn't until later that I found out that fucks rarely flew.
Three months later, I was diagnosed as schizophrenic. I was placed on various new medications, some for my new condition and others to more effectively treat my depression. I read every insert, beginning to end. One side effect of the Zyprexa sill stands out.
Sudden, inexplicable death.
Maybe not in those exact words, but it was pretty damn close. I shit you not.
It was incredibly rare, but one could always hope.
Nothing got better, and I didn't even get the treat of my beloved side effect. Life's a bitch, ain't it?
So I turned to writing, and I fell in love. Poems, sonnets, limmericks, lyrics, short stories, monologues; I did it all. And then I started to write a book. I called it White Rabbit.
Finally, I had a reason to want to live again. I wanted to live to finish my book. I told my therapist this. She said that it was good to have something to help me go on, but what would I do once it was finished? Since I knew she didn't want to hear the truth, I lied.
I'll start another one.
She seemed pleased by that answer.
Writing became my lifeline. It was how I expressed myself. It was how I could get out all the shit in my head without hurting myself. But it didn't seem complete. So I started to cut again, but more discreetly this time. I didn't want to get caught; my parents were finally beginning to ease up on me. Mostly I focused on cutting my legs. That way I could wear jeans and no one would suspect a thing.
Ah, I was so tricky. But I again digress.
I loved my book. I adored it. I had only written half of the first chapter, and already it was the best thing I had ever read. I poured all of my time into it. I pushed aside homework, I pushed aside social gatherings, hell, I even stopped taking meals unless I could eat them at my computer. I only typed my writing; I was too slow with handwriting. This way I could write and not forget what I was doing in mid-sentence. The meds had started to slow my brain and mess with my concentration. I stopped taking them. I figured, hell, why not, they didn't help; all they did was interfere with my creative process.
People started to notice my acting differently at school. More of my friends drifted away. My grand friend count was down to four. Still no one knew what was going on in my head. They didn't know about the voices, about the depression, about the self-mutilation. I eventually grew to love it. The sadder I was, the happier I got. More than anything, I feared that it would go away. For some sick reason, I loved to torture myself. It was a beautiful, beautiful high, better than any drug could ever give me.
Masochist? Me? Never.
I still cried to myself at night, but now, it was mixed with hysterical laughter.
By this time I was no longer sleeping.
The lack of sleep had nothing to do with my writing. I really had no idea what induced it, and I have yet to figure it out.

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A/N: This is the third of three books I'm writing at the moment. This one, I can tell, will be more of a novella. Stuff in the things >like this< are parts of the book she's writing. More than anything, while I write this, I'm trying to make it feel honest over sounding pretty. As if you were reading her diary or something, or if she were talking to you. Please review and tell me how you think I'm doing. Chapter two coming around soon.
Oh, and I'm not using quotation marks, except for in the excerpts from her book. Because I want it to be that way. So there.