Jane [h.s.]

eight

She felt like her heart was going to beat straight out of her chest. It was hard to breathe both because she couldn't stop crying and because she was so unbelievably afraid of what was going to happen to her.

Her eyes roamed frantically, but this time it was her controlling them and not her mind. Jane's head was pounding because of how loud the voices were shouting and because of how much stress she was already putting her body through.

They passed a few patients on their way down the hall, each one refused to look at her, keeping their eyes trained on the ground and fiddling with anything that they could. Harry's sister, Rosalie, walked by and Jane thought that she saw a pained look on her face, but she couldn't focus through all the noise and she had probably just imagined it.

The heavy metal door was right in front of her now. Jane tried to get away one last time, flailing her arms and kicking anywhere in an attempt to at least injure someone so that the pressure would be released from her arms.

After only about a minute, she gave up and cried because she knew it was no use. Jane tried to make her body feel numb to match how she felt, but the voices in her head were making it difficult and she was shaking with fear long before they strapped her down.

Even though she had been through the first part hundreds of time, the sting of the needle in her arm burned like fire as they strapped the conductors to her head. She hadn't stopped crying for about two days and she vaguely thought about how it was strange that she hadn't run out of tears yet.

The nurse that had stayed in the room, her hand on the dial, looked like she wanted to be anywhere else and Jane wished that she was. Just like every time before, she wasn't numb when the dial was pushed forward.

Jane felt every surge and every spasm that her body made in response up until it became too much for her body and she lost consciousness.

She didn't remember anything after that, but the nurse in the room would remember it every day until she died.

When she woke up again, Jane couldn't do much of anything. The voices were gone and her head felt clear for the first time in forever, but she knew that something was missing. Jane couldn't remember much of anything and what she could remember was strange and came in broken pieces that didn't make sense.

After a while, some things came back and she remembered who she was, where she was, and what had happened to her, but a lot of little things were just gone and it put her in even more pain when she tried to figure out what they were.

Every day, she would see the same memory of a handsome man smiling at her like she was the sun, but she had no idea who he was or what he meant to her. There would always be a strange feeling in her chest when it happened and she knew that she missed him, whoever he was.

They had kept her isolated for a while and, when they finally let her rejoin the daily routine, she wasn't sure what to do because everything around her was chaotic and she had no idea who most people were.

On the second day, she saw the man that she'd been seeing in her mind. He was sitting across the room with a woman who looked like him and he looked awful. In her memory, she remembered him as lively and very healthy, but now, as she looked at him from across the room, he looked like a skeleton and there wasn't a single thing that she could point out that made him look happy.

He spoke few words and sat in his own little bubble for the longest time. Jane didn't know why, but she found herself wondering if he didn't see her and if he didn't want to see her. She frowned as she picked at the awful looking sandwich the lady behind the counter had given her.