SUMMARY — during a psychotic episode, VINA hallucinates something that prompts a painful realisation. (MYRA belongs to neospacewriting)

WORD COUNT: 498 words

CATEGORY: angst

CONTENT WARNINGS: mentions of suicide, and descriptions of suicidal thoughts; graphic descriptions of mental illness, psychosis & delusions, as well as descriptions of a psychotic episode & trichotillomania/compulsive hair pulling

Vina's stubby fingers clawed at the uneven skin of her arms, her short, bitten nails scratching ceaselessly at the scarred surface as she sat, blot upright, in the middle of the hospital bed, illuminated faintly by the scarce light cast out from the EKG monitor she was strapped to. Earlier, she could've sworn she felt something brush against the bare skin of her back underneath her hospital gown when she was previously reclined, propped up at decently comfortable angle by the pillows, staring into the space between the atoms of the curtains in front of her; and now, despite her attempts to rationalise that her "pleasantly overactive imagination" - as her mother had so graciously put it - was probably acting up, she couldn't prevent her mind from racing to one uncomfortable conclusion after another, sending her down a spiral of outwardly irrational rituals in an attempt to soothe her seething mind, and to maybe finally let her catch a few hours of thoughtless sleep for once.

No, the spiders in her skin just had to whisper to her; she didn't want to sound completely insane, but she truly did hear bits and pieces of their demeaning voices, and they always touched on the same topics - her own death, preferably via suicide, was something she thought about very often, so it didn't provoke her as much as it used to; but the second subject always managed to make her feel something amidst the aggravating numbness this time of night always managed to bring to her: Myra.

Thinking about her, bringing the idea of her to the front of her mind after hours of trying to supress her in her entirety, was enough to make Vina feel sick; her fingers had subconsciously moved from her arms to the hair on the back of her head, idly pulling at the individual strands at the base of her skull and tossing them over the side of the bed, letting them land onto the floor - the repetitive, usually soothing action miserably failing to bring her the reprieve she needed in this instance.

Vina hated Myra - hated the way she made her feel, a gut-wrenching agony, a longing that clawed and tugged and wrestled with the allayed acid in the pits of her stomach, something irritably poetic and beautiful that made her want to scream until her vocal chords finally shrivelled up - and she almost did, but not for that reason.

The reason was standing at the foot of her bed, clear as first hues of dawn starting across the inky canvas of the sky behind the sterile hospital curtains - that is, as clear as something would be if one was looking at it through a misty haze on an exceptionally rainy day: Myra, faceless, voiceless, but so blatantly dismayed; and, in an instant, gone without a trace.

Vina, in her horror, could only draw one conclusion from the instance: somehow, by some uncanny means, she had allowed herself to forget what Myra looked like.