Sarah

Sarah was clawing at her door with the key, desperate to get to her room, to the paper. Fumbling with the anger and shakiness of an addict she finally managed to catch the lock and burst through the door, rushed in her room molting all her stuff for the day and grabbed the nearest notebook opening it to somewhere in the center fumbled madly around for a pen, displacing all the other contents of her desk, many hundreds of old sheets of lists, poems, essays, journals and stories upset by her blind turbunlence. Having found a pen she settled her self quickly into the chair bent so far over the table that it seemed as if she were trying to fall into the page she was swiftly covering in black ink. After a few moments she melted back into her chair and became so placid that even the strange, turbulent breathing of the moments prior became just a distant memory in the paper laden landscape.

Sarah was not a writer, nor did she think much about trying to become one, but she was controlled by the addiction she had for recording her madnesses. Sarah didn't think much of these stories, poems and sometimes even pictures, they were just piled around her because they seemed like they belonged to the scene of her tiny flat. Her small apartment was ruled by papers and books, strewn across the few pieces of furniture that she had, a desk, a chair and a matress. She hadn't seen the floor in years and didn't remember if it was carpet or wood or something else entirely. It didn't matter much, this was her private citadel, her asylum, she never brought people here, and she barely slept in her own matress. The only useable item in the entire flat was her coffee machine and it was always slowly brewing help for her obsession with recording things that ached to be physical.

Some papers only had a few words on them, things she liked, or random obbsessions she had thought of that day. One of the more recent piles had only the words, "cellar door" and another only, "grass smells like aged rain". She couldn't remember why these were important, but she knew they were true and she liked them. Sarah just knew these things were, why or how seemed not an issue because to Sarah these papers were like finished books. She obviously saw much more in some of the pages than anyone else could though what could be gotten from a page saying only, "Eggs", would never be understood outside her world. Had someone asked about this, Sarah only would have smiled and said it was the beginning of a grocery list, even though it wasn't.

Yet this day after Sarah had become a lump in her chair "post-attack", as she called it, she didn't feel the relief she normally gained. Perhaps the stress of her situation was the cause or perhaps it had just not hit her yet. But her alarm clock, which always set to an incorrect time which at the moment was only about three and a half hours off, was ticking so loudly it was actually making Sarah feel ill. And she knew she had to move and that the joy was just not going to come today. She silently reached out and plucked the clock from beneath a light covering of papers and checked the time, looked out her small dingy window, looked back at the clock, wound it back another forty minutes and then set it back down. Sarah wondered if she should do anything about the papers, but they were thoughts dispensed and she didn't think she particularly needed any of them. And so she decided to pack her stuff and grabbed the clock and the coffee machine put them in a box with her few items of clothing and then Sarah opened the door and left. Locking the door behind her, locking two years of frantic writing, seeking a solution to the pounding of her heart and the broken record of her brain.

Sarah thought quite often that she might be crazy or mentally incapacitated. She wouldn't have been surprised if someone told her that she could no longer care for herself, that she was incapable. Sarah didn't know how she lived, she couldn't remember, but perhaps that sheet, "Eggs", would remind her of something important. But she decided not to take her thoughts with her, they wouldn't be nessecary where she was going. Sarah paused on the step of her now old building and tried to remember where she was going, and she realised it really didn't matter and she turned down the street and faded away into the crowd of late night party go-ers ready to drink themselves into the next day, many of them would call their experience a black oblivion, but Sarah couldn't picture this, she couldn't picture much if it wasn't written in English. But she had always liked the sound, but if you were in that state of being how would you know it? Sarah always just figured that it must only be what people observed in hindsight and there for a transitory state. Perhaps she hadn't left this state yet and as she thought this her small frame disappeared from the putrid, green light of the last streetlamp.

Many years have passed since she disappeared and Sarah is still wandering from place to place, she does not write anymore, her doctor gave her drugs to keep her "functioning". They said she had schizophrenia, but that they had managed to solve her problems with their treatments. Sarah didn't care, she was now a different person, and the feelings and thoughts that had been left in her small, grey flat were only phantoms in her otherwise standard life. She still enjoyed reading though and found bits of reality arising from the internal worlds, sometimes there would be phrases that echoed in the back of her mind but they died before she will understand why.

The only problem that she endured was this weak warning signal in the back of her head that her Mecca was decaying, and her wanderlust seemed to grow stronger despite the medications that she took. She felt empty, not the empty she used to feel where everything to her was on paper but the desperate lonliness of realising you are actually alone because you don't even have yourself. Sarah knew her drugs caused this, but she took them with an almost robotic manner that had been burned into her routine from several years of repetition. And to relieve herself she bought a new book of poetry and short stories.

She openned the hardcover with the pleasant crack of new binding bending to allow the contents to be viewed. What Sarah found inside were her memories. She read the entire book with the ferocity of a starving fox that has found a freshly killed stag. Sarah thought it was too familiar, it must be hers, someone must have used her writings. She remembered her last day sitting behind that desk, she remembered writing something, this. She took her medication without thought. Sarah looked at it again, did she write anything, this? No, she must have just read this book before without realising, Sarah could never have been a writer. Besides all the good authors only get recognized posthumously. She read the poem again for good measure before placing the bookmark on that page, closing the book and placing it on the shelf to collect dust with all the other dead worlds in her flat. The poem rang in her memory, but the drugs were starting to numb everything again.

I am leaving,
I will never be back.
I am leaving my mind,
I will never get it back.
I can't remember how I got here.
I can't remember why I'm leaving.
I must be a broken child,
I must leaving this all behind.
I don't know who I am.
I don't know where I'll go.
I wish I could remember,
I wish I could stay.
I am leaving,
I will never be back.
I am leaving my mind,
I will never get it back.

Sarah wondered why she had thought about it, she turned to more important things. She wondered what her doctors would think, if she even remembered this by tomorrow.