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Stockholm Syndrome

THIS TEXT HAS CONTENT RELATED TO SOMETHING THAT COULD EASILY CAUSE A TRIGGER IN SOME PEOPLE. REFERENCES OF ABUSE, MENTAL ILLNESS AND LOSS ARE IN THIS STORY. THOUGH MILD, IF YOU FEEL YOU ARE EASILY TRIGGERED, I ADVISE YOU STOP READING NOW. Thank you.

"STOCKHOLM SYNDROME"- CREATIVE ESSAY

Dedicated to projectmindgames

I stood there, frozen, as the strong beam of the head lamps grew brighter, harsher, illuminating his wide open body. Him, in his green t-shirt and his dark blue jeans. I stood there, restricted, unable to move, and watched as his legs bent unnaturally backwards on impact, and the sheer force of the collision threw him like a rag-doll over the windshield. The familiar crack of a bone breaking filled my ears as his once beautiful head hit the cold, solid ground.

I scrambled to release myself from my shackles and run to him, but his bindings kept me in place. A crowd was gathering around him, I was losing my line of sight. I continued to fumble with the knots around my wrists and also those in my stomach. What had he done? My feet met the glass littered floor, and I ran.

My bare feet dripped with blood as I ran to him, blinded by tears, deafened by screams, drenched in sweat and dirt, reeking. I dropped to my knees when I reached him, my wrists burned from the ties. There was red, so much red! All of it draining from his torn skin, oozing out of his open wounds. The sound of him drowning, choking on his own blood stained into my mind how the blood stained his sickly green shirt. I grabbed his hand and our eyes met, he held me in his hollow gaze until the sirens came. He went still.

One long and painful ambulance ride later, the staff rushed around him, trying to bring him back. I begged and pleaded for him to come back to me. Wasn't I good enough? Didn't I make him happy? His eyes stayed dry and lifeless, and his heart neglected to move. Hadn't I satisfied his needs?

23:08; I stopped crying.

They took him away and wrestled me into another room, one where I couldn't be with him. Solitude, again. I kept screaming for them to let me see him. Why did he leave me?

What happened? Voices kept demanding 'who is he?' I stayed quiet, mumbling vague answers to my own questions. What had actually happened? I couldn't tell. Not everything, not anything. If I did, what would happen? What would they do?

At that moment, a series of disturbing images ran through my head: I sat at a table as a woman in bleak, neutral white marked my injuries onto a diagram. My blood-stained rags sat in a clear polythene bag, the red wetness pushing against the sides, forcing its way to me. My blood and his together, the only time we'd be so close again. "He's not a criminal" I procrastinate as the woman in white lists my scars along with my birthmarks. "You can't say that about him just for keeping me!" I shake the thought from my head.

I had always thought he could deal with it, his impulses, and his unbeatable desire to...hurt. I had always assumed he enjoyed it; he had always told me so. Obviously, it wasn't just me who was trapped; he was just as much a prisoner.

I stood next to him; his skin was turning a translucent grey. His eyes were milky, hard, lost in something unknown to me yet something I had been so close to before. I held his shredded, now predominantly red t-shirt in my clenched fists and hugged it. His possessive stench still lingered, hovering around me in a thick, dark smog, still clinging on for life, keeping me in its tight grasp, its hands around my throat. I placed the shirt on the table and wrapped my arms around my belly. Suddenly death didn't seem so lonely.

The door behind me opened, but did not close. I spun around, curious, and confused, to see what was going on. I blinked.
"Faith....?" A voice asked. Guilty, sick was how I felt. I hadn't seen this face in years, heard this voice in years.

"Paige?" I asked. My sister stood, shocked, in the doorway staring at me. Her petite frame had grown; she was strangely lanky, athletic looking. Her pleated tartan skirt and crisp white shirt stood out from the gloom of the blue walls surrounding me, her auburn hair was pulled back into a full, bouncy pony-tail. Her make-up was smudged down her face in long teary streaks. I reached for the hand of the icy body next to me.

Paige's vivid blue eyes followed my warped hand to the corpse next to me, him, and she stepped forwards. Her eyes, studied me intently as she moved closer.

"You can't stay here" she whispered, and reached her hand out to take mine from his. I recoiled. She continued, persistent, and the moment her heated skin touched mine I collapsed into her arms, begging her for forgiveness. My fingers stayed touching his.

She led me from the room by my wrist and I watched as the distance between me and my everything grew, how the doors folded closed and appeared to shrink as if to prevent me from ever re-entering.

The doors to an unfamiliar world opened in front of me. Cameras flashed and microphones moved inches from my face. Voices littered around me asking the same questions; one reporter, a brunette, stands in front of me.

"Why did you stay with your captor? Do you think that, considering your apparent willingness to stay with your captor, you may have an illness known as Stockholm syndrome?" I look at her, confused. A police officer appears and guides my sister and I through the sea of reporters and takes us into a dark car. "One question, Miss Wilde. Why did you stay?" I pondered this, for a short while and concluded: "He needed me."

I looked to the window where photographers clambered over one another to get a shot. My sister's hand stayed firmly around my wrist and I whispered to him, "I love you, goodbye."