Rose
Time passes like water through my fingers. No matter how much I count, no matter how hard I try to keep track of it, it escapes me.
I stare down at my palms in my lap in my defeat for a moment. Time feels like it stops in this dreaded room during these stifling conversations, but that’s a fallacy. It continues, stretching thin during these sessions but never stopping completely.
Not even for me.
Time will not heel to my violence.
My eyes catch on the calendar hanging up on Joe’s wall. He’s stopped his relentless speaking to respond to an email, something he rarely does. But I’ve taken this time away from his microscope-like gaze to examine the room.
It felt like I’d turned eighteen only a few weeks ago.
I shrivel back when I realize that, no, it hadn’t been a few weeks, but closer to a year.
Today, I am not myself. Today, I am some sort of Bruce Banner, sullen and so inside myself that maybe I’m the only casualty of that anger that hasn’t reacted in so long. I wonder if my monster is asleep or simply dead forever.
Illogically, I miss the mad monster.
“Well, I have to say that I’m happy we haven’t had an incident from you in some time.”
I don’t respond—verbally or nonverbally—my eyes still on the calendar.
What would the point be?
He’s set his laptop aside and those intrusive brown irises are back on me, sizing me up, attempting to understand me, wanting to dissect me.
But there is no understanding me.
We are wasting our time here.
“Is there anything you’d like to say, Rosamunde?” He leans forward and braces himself on his elbows. “You’ve been awfully quiet this session.”
I want to laugh, a dry chuckle laced with confusion and annoyance. “Is that not what you want? What you and your staff have attempted to do all this time? Take my anger, beat it out of me, silence me, make me brain dead like everyone else here?” The words started out quiet and clear but ended with my teeth bared.
He shakes his head and the look in his eyes makes me want to scream.
There she is, they say to me. There’s the monster.
“I will never win here,” I whisper, my eyes filling.
“What is it you think winning means?”
The sigh released from my parted lips is choppy and pregnant with an emotion that threatens to strangle me. “Freedom.”
He doesn’t say it, but the little shake of his head tells me what I feared.
There is no freedom for you, Rosamunde Montgomery.
Hell is your home.