Open Heart {Under Revision}

Chapter 8- Behind the Eyes

Nine Years Ago...

"Charlotte darling?" my grandmother called in, opening the bedroom door slightly, "Wake up. We have someone waiting to meet you."

I was awake actually. I couldn't sleep the whole night. There were many nights such when my eyes would look at the unmoving ceiling and draw parallelism to my unmoving body. Both of them, two best friends constructing bricks of stationary virtue adhered together by my mind. Together all them made me a stagnant soul with visions of limited future.

"Wake up now, darling." She pulled the covers off my body and I pretended a yawn so that she wouldn't have a heart attack seeing my eyes gaping open like a dead fish. But that I was on the inside, a little deadfish with pale skin and lips as red as blood and hair in spiked juts. And eyes which have lost their green hints in brown background just like my grandmother's kinder ones. Just like my father's harsher ones.

The housemaids helped me to do my business in silence and soon I was being wheeled towards the sizable living room of my father's ancestral home. It had been a castle at some point before that was restored into modernity. A layer of novelty added upon history. A layer to conceal the stains of this family.

There was a woman sitting on the living room and her eyes lighted up when she saw me coming. She was a stranger just like every soul in my life but there was something about her which made me look for my broken shields. She was neither pretty nor physically fit. She was rather thin and all bones with face impossibly sharp to dwindle any lusture. But her eyes, they were starkly demonstrative blue colour accented with minimal amount of makeup.

"Hello!" she arranged a huge smile on her face which created creases on corners of her eyes. I placed her somewhere in late twenties.

I pasted a fake smile, "Good morning."

She stood up, and her tall frame was structured in her grey coloured business suit. Her hair was long, black like night and fell near her waist in curls just like I once had. She walked near me and brought her hand forward.

"I'm Dr. Ulna Rosenstein."

I frowned but shook her hands. My grandmother then thanked this doctor for coming and I wondered if she was my latest physiotherapist.

The woman then turned her eyes back to me, "I am a psychologist, specializing in psychotraumatology and psychoanalysis."

Glaring at my grandmother, I spoke in a chipped tone, "A shrink? Whyever you bring a shrink here, grandma?"

She gave an apologetic look to the shrink whose face remained same, "Forgive me. Charlotte...she has been through a lot these few months...a year now actually."

"No worries, Dr. Turner." The shrink replied, "I know." And then she casted an intent look back to me, "I know."

Somehow, I wanted to believe her because her expression wasn't that of pity of sympathy. It was of acceptance. Everyone had been trying to change me, not accept this new twist of my life. They poked and probed around, trying to find why the heck I wouldn't get up. But they never found any answers since they started from the wrong question. But there was a difference about this woman which made me develop a minuscule spark within.

"I am going to leave you two alone now." My grandma gently squeezed my shoulders, her face beaming with criss-cross lines, "I'll be around if you need me."

She left me there with this strange woman and we watched her go. Then the shrink walked to the sofa and sat down, crossing her leg. She didn't grab my chair to wheel me near her, rather motioned me to come there. I put my hands on the wheels and pranced myself so that there was a handfast distance between us both.