I'm Normally Perfect (re-upload)

Chapter Twenty-Four

It wasn't fair. I'd been doing so well. It'd been more than a year and a half since I'd felt that way. I'd thought maybe I was done with it, that it wouldn't happen again. I thought maybe since my life was so different than it had been when I'd first felt like that I was free. Yet here it was again, that vague sense of otherness. Where I felt like something apart from everyone else on earth, removed somehow and simultaneously hyper-aware of all of the pain and injustice in the world. Soon every bad thing that had ever happened or been said to me would begin to play on an endless loop in my mind until one day it would simply stop as quickly as it began. But that day could be months away, and when it was happening it felt as though it had always been that way and would continue to be that way for eternity. It felt as if a curtain was being lifted and the truth was being revealed to me and the truth was horrible. As if I had only been missing how terrible life truly was, but now was seeing it clearly.

The mere thought of having to endure that again, for months, exhausted me. Maybe I should tell Alex, so she'd know what to expect. So it wouldn't take her by as much surprise as it had me the first few times. In an odd way I was grateful that I'd been through it before and could recognise what was happening. The first few times I hadn't known what was happening and thought I was going crazy. The bad part was that where I'm from, being depressed was as good as talking to invisible men who lived on your shoulder, or thinking the government was trying to control you with secret, high frequency radio signals. My parents always said I was in, "one of those moods." They always said it in a disgusted way, as though I were doing it on purpose. Father called it "moping" and mother called it "pouting"; they made me feel I was being selfish. At least Alex knew that it wasn't intentional.

I lay in the dark, looking up at the canopy over my bed, the only light coming from behind the fireguard. The grandfather clock down the hall counted eleven bells, after what felt like ten minutes it went again and counted twelve bells. I threw off the bedclothes and, shivering in the cold, pushed open the curtains and looked at the back garden. It was beautiful in a last-place-on-earth sort of way. It seemed so peaceful and poetic out there I decided to go for a walk. I piled on several layers of clothes and made my way downstairs. Being in a house that size at least I didn't have to worry about waking anyone. The door at the end of the west wing was locked, but the key was hanging on a hook just inside. The key looked like it belonged in a castle somewhere, it was long and heavy and very simple looking, though it turned smoothly in the lock. I dropped it in my pocket, out of fear that I'd get locked out. I wanted to go for a stroll in the back garden, not wind up stuck out there until dawn.

I held the heavy door while it closed so it wouldn't bang shut and looked up at the house. The darkened windows made it seem sinister. During the day it merely looked like a manor house in a guidebook, Big Damn Houses of England or something, at night it looked like Dr Frankenstein's castle. I half expected lightening to strike one of the turrets or bats to flutter round one of the attic windows. I turned to the garden, shivering, though more from the creepy feeling the house gave me than from the cold. Darkened windows spooked me; I was always scared someone or something would appear in them, smile a big, pointy-toothed grin and wave at me, red eyes glowing. And Tillington had several dozen windows, so that left loads of places for oogie-boogies to suddenly appear.

The sight of the gardens soothed me, though. Blue and white under the moon, the Knot garden a monochrome geometric pattern set off to the right of the property, the maze on the right side of that. I briefly entertained the idea of walking through the maze, then flashed on the end of The Shining and changed my mind, heading instead toward Alex's statue. Up close it looked like a giant's chess piece that had accidentally been left out. Every now and again the wind keened softly. Heaven might look like that, minus the bone chilling temperature. Frost crunched beneath my boots and I tried to commit every second to memory to use in a future story, or as a calming memory, as I made my way to the back end of the property to my gazebo, which the weather had stripped of roses and ivy leaving it a large, white birdcage.