Page 31 of Madness

There is no point in running the risk of trying to kill ourselves with springs or thread from losing our minds from loneliness.

I hear how the others around me scream at night, talking to the voices in their head that their mind makes up to make their existence less bleak inside of the confined four walls that we’re forced into.

I know it’s midnight from the guard's walk echoing down the hallways, his gait different from the evening guard that roams the hallways every fifteen minutes. I smile at his arrival because now I can finally breathe.

I count to one thousand and two hundred… twenty minutes.

His checks never last long; he’s grown lazy over the last four years, and I sit up from my thin mat, swinging my legs over the side and stand.

I stretch my arms above my head; the popping of my spine makes me groan, and I suppress the urge to do it again.

I can’t waste any more time.

I pick the lock, something that has become second nature to me after sneaking out of this room to escape at night for the last three years. Slowly creaking the door open, I try to be careful not to make a sound to alert the guard of my movements.

The carpeted flooring helps to muffle my footsteps in my room, and I keep my feet bare so they don’t feel heavy as I lurk around the halls of the institute at night.

The door doesn’t make a sound as I open it, and I slip out, careful not to alert the other patients of my little adventures.

I’m not trying to escape – never without my Atropa.

The hallways are eerily quiet tonight; the usual patients who scream are silent, but I move forward. I can’t afford to get mixed up in more trouble here than I already have.

The cool night air is a balm to my soul as I sneak out of the fire escape a floor up in Ward D. I was here once when the last Jabberwocky thought he would see if I was more amendable drugged and chained to a bed.

I wasn’t.

I was put back into solitary within a week, and I’ve been there since. No visitors were allowed - not like my family would visit me anyway, and I was left to rot in my cell.

My bare feet sink into the soft grass, the blades damp from the cool night air, and I tip my head back and breathe in a lungful of crisp air through my nose.

I don’t escape out here every night, preferring to sink into my Atropa’s warm embrace until the dawn peeks over the horizon, and only then will I sneak back down to the depths of Wonderland and back to my cell.

The glass greenhouse is hidden at the back of the garden, hidden by years of neglected trees and bushes.

The glass door groans as I slide it, but thankfully, there are no guards this far out. They’ve become too complacent at their jobs, years of the patients being obedient zombies enough for them not to care anymore.

My plants are further back, and the smashed windowpane above them lets them get water naturally in rainy England.

Sinking my fingers into the damp soil, I allow myself to feel free, if even only for a moment.

I know I’ll have to go back to my cell tonight, but I savour the chill in the night air and the sounds of the wildlife surrounding me as I work on my babies.

Deadly – something no patient should have access to, but I do.

Jameson owed me, and he knew that I wanted an option to end my life on my terms should this place ever pull me down into its depths further.

Before my Atropa, I wanted to die daily, ready to give into the darkness they force us to fall into.

The rabbit hole is a ward up from solitary; the patients there are drugged until they no longer know what reality they are experiencing is the real one.

Solitary gets no such thing.

We are left with our every thought, no matter how dark it turns, and Wonderland is no place for people who want to escape to try to get better.

They want us here forever, and they will do whatever they can to make sure it happens.

Realising I’ve let my thoughts spiral to the point of no return, I wash my hands in the water bucket, clean the soil from my fingers, and make my way back into the institute.

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