Fade out (again)

Blue latex hands

I awaken to the glare of an unforgiving sky blue light, seeming to hone in on my face as I scan my surroundings with weary eyes.

The sterile room is a clean tiled white, with the smell of an aggressive bleach conquering my nostrils. I find I cannot move my limbs, as they are restricted by seemingly ever tightening straps that keep me in place on a flat table. I can't lift my head.

I remember why I am here.  

I wanted to be an artist, painting my view of the world in shades of pain, shades of torture, shades of hope. But people didn't read the same message in the works I created. Everyone who became exposed to my paintings thought I was disturbed. That I had a twisted mind and didn't belong in their world. Perhaps I didn't and I would have been fine with that.

Until my parents were exposed to them too.

 On that fateful day I came back to see cruel, judging faces staring back at me, holding my life's work wearing shocked and disgusted expressions as if the paintings were mirrors. It was like they never knew me at all.

"We just want our child back."

"It's for your own good."

They signed me off to the most advanced (and painful) treatments in mental health, and in the middle of the night I was kidnapped, taken away to a place that prided itself on absolute purity and hallowed anything it deemed unclean.

The doctors tried everything to slow my mind, to prevent the "impure" thoughts and ideas. But the longer I spent away from my easel the more I yearned to paint again. The medication didn't help, it made me feel less like myself, and with every increase of the dosage I could feel myself slip away more. This pleased them; they were getting the results they wanted but it was short lived. My place in the world wouldn't fade out just yet.

They only had one thing left to try at this point. Electroconvulsive therapy.

Before tying me down onto this table, the doctors had to walk me through a neighbourhood to get to the newer part of the asylum, the special one for individuals like me. I was brought into a wing where blue latex gloves trimmed my hair and smeared a numbing gel across my forehead, foreshadowing what was to later happen to my brain. 

I couldn't speak with the mouth guard restricting me but my mind was desperate for escape, so it sang.

Rows of houses all bearing down on me, I can feel their blue hands touching me.

"All these things into position Doc," exclaims a young intern to my left, standing next to the metal tray as he finishes attaching the electrodes to my forehead.

All these things we'll one day swallow whole.

The doctor smiles at me unbeknownst to my pain as she slowly turns the dial responsible for surging a low voltage of electricity through my body. I cannot open my mouth and I must scream.

And fade out again.

My last thought before time stops, and my mind goes numb.