Chapter 1.2: Galanthus Nivalis – Hope

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I tried to swallow the immense knot that had formed in my throat. Despite memories coming back in waves, she wasn’t present in any of them.

“You probably don’t remember me”, she had continued. “We met a couple of times when you were young, and I moved in after you went in. ”

Her handwriting was large, easy to read, but my vision fogged. After I went in?

“I know you remember yourself being sixty-three, but you’re actually twenty-two. You went in the machine when you were ten. Everything you remember after that didn’t happen in reality.”

Time stretched into infinity and I couldn’t breathe. I dropped the notepad while trying to take the information in and calm down. I couldn’t. I had had an inkling, but to hear it – well, read it – from somebody else made it real. An overwhelming sense of dread and panic filled me. I was a gas canister and that sentence was the spark that threatened to make me explode.

A small room, filled with black and white posters. Soft fur on my neck. A warm kiss. Cold, wet liquid seeping through my jeans. Laughter.

I had to finish reading. I had to focus.

Ok. I needed to find five things I could see, to keep me grounded. Hands. Table. Pen. Cup. Tray. Good. Now four things I could hear.

Dammit.

I had forgotten about my hearing. I took a few deep breaths and that kept me grounded for a while.

“Your dad kept wanting to take you out. We both did, but it was never the right time.”

So you left me in there to rot, I thought, the knot in my stomach tightening. I looked up. She smiled weakly, encouraging me to keep reading. Bile rose into my throat.

“During this time, you were well taken care of. To the best of our abilities. Your father talked to you every nigI tried to swallow the immense knot that had formed in my throat. Despite memories coming back in waves, she wasn’t present in any of them.

“You probably don’t remember me”, she had continued. “We met a couple of times when you were young, and I moved in after you wearound the house. I made sure you were healthy and clean and comfortable.”

I had to stop reading. Dalia’s note didn’t seem to answer any of my questions as well as I would have hoped and, frankly, it was starting to make me sick to my stomach. I closed my eyes, but the words had burned themselves into my mind.

I opened my eyes and flipped the notepad’s pages until I reached an empty one. “Where is he?” I wrote.

She hesitated before taking the notepad. “He’s not well. He’s been in the hospital for a couple of weeks.”

My shoulders relaxed slightly. At least I didn’t have to deal with him yet. I grabbed the pen again. “Why did you let me out now?”

“I didn’t, Celia. You got out yourself.”

Celia. The name felt both strange and nostalgic, like a new edition of a beloved book.

A question burned the tip of my tongue, but I was afraid to know the answer. Was it an accident that I got out?

Dalia had written one more line, while I was trying to gather the courage to ask. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to go back in.”

For a second, I pondered if I wanted to return to my imaginary life. Living in a dream was certainly better than this filthy truth. However, I had been robbed of so much time, I could never willingly give up even more.

“What do you plan to do with me, then?” I asked. Emotions were boiling under my skin, mingling with the memory fragments.

Dalia wrote quickly as if trying to assure me. “I don’t plan to do anything. I will be here, to help you with cleaning and cooking and whatnot, but you are free to do whatever you want.”

“Oh, that’s great!” I carved in the paper.

She looked up and beamed, relief painted on her face. I almost felt bad to wipe that glimmer of hope from her eyes.

“I can’t wait to meet my friends, which I have none of, to listen to music, which I am unable to, to frolic and run around the streets, which I am too weak to do, to get a job, that I have no formal education or applicable skills for. It’s brilliant!”

Her eyes darkened after reading my rant. She must have believed I was just happy as a clam to be out.

“You don’t need to rush to do anything”, she wrote. “Everything will come in time.”

“I don’t know anything about this place.”

“You have all the time in the world to learn.”

I was too angry to write anymore. She acted like it was such a normal thing, to get used to a new place and a new set of people, a new social status, a new age.

A new age.

I didn’t even know what I looked like. She’d told me I was twenty-two, which is quite a shock considering just hours before I had been sixty-three. How could I get used to this? Maybe there is a self-help book I could ask her to recommend? “Turning back 40 years: 40 do’s and 40 don’ts”.

She had written some more, and was now showing me the notepad: “Half of the house is yours. There is a bank account in your name, though I can’t tell you precisely how much money you have. You can discuss it with your dad when he gets better. Don’t worry about anything for now. Just focus on getting used to your new situation.”

“What situation? Being deaf or being pulled away from what I thought was my life?” I hoped my words were dripping with as much anger as I wrote them with.

“Both. I know you can handle it, Celia. You’re strong.”

“You have no way of knowing how strong I am.”

“I do. I watched over you all these years. I’ve been here since you were little.”

The thought that she knew all about my life, my relationships, my thoughts while I knew nothing brought me new clarity about how defenseless I truly was. I tasted bile, and the room seemed to spin.

“Can you leave? I need some time to think.”

“Sure thing. I’ll write my number down. Just give me a call whenever you need anything, okay?”

She glanced up to catch my eyes, but I looked away, arms crossed. Even with the astronomically low chance that I wanted to see her again, I had no phone to call her from. She still wrote her phone number down.

Dalia grabbed her jacket and got ready to leave, fumbling under my stare. There was something else I needed to do before she left. I slipped her a note.

“Give me your keys. I don’t feel comfortable that you can come in and out as you please while I am trapped here like a rat.”

She nodded and handed me a keychain with three keys. The biggest one was for outside, she motioned. The middle one was from the main door. The last one was from some room in the house she vaguely pointed to.

Dalia waved and reached for my arm but decided against touching me and left. As soon as she took two steps into the street, I shut the door, locked it, and left the keys in.

Still, I wasn’t done. I wanted to check whether I truly was alone. With heavy steps, I shuffled from one room to another, on high alert. Not being able to hear had made me cautious of my surroundings. Luckily, I seemed to be alone.

According to a clock I found upstairs, it was only a little after noon when I finished, but my body felt like it had been beaten with socks filled with rocks and my headache wasn’t completely gone. I dragged the lead stumps I called legs up the stairs and into what I felt had been my room. Or, at least, the room I felt most comfortable in.

The air wasn’t nearly as stuffy as in a place that hadn’t been lived in at least twelve years. Also, it surprised me to see that it wasn’t filled with toys or children’s clothes, but with things normally found in a young adults’ room. A small vanity mirror with a few cosmetics, several outfits meant for all types of weather in the wardrobe, a simple rectangular library with a few books from different genres.

If I were to guess, I would say they tried keeping the room up to date with my age, as years went by. Then why did they let me stay in the virtual life for so long?

Turning around, my breath stopped. On the other side of the room I saw so, so many musical instruments: two violins (a Cremona and a Stradivarius, both in mint condition), a viola, a gorgeous Bösendorfer piano, an unmarked classical guitar, a Lazarro silver nickel flute, and a box of countless musical accessories. I touched the viola with shaky fingers.

The feeling of my chin, resting on the smooth rest. The tremble of the bow. Pages and pages of musical notes I knew by heart.

I looked away, my heart beating too fast for comfort. It was too painful to see them mere hours after I had lost my hearing. I directed my attention to the neat stack of diaries on the desk, bearing my name on their front covers.

The first few diaries mostly had doodles and short notes about my day from when I was a child. I had bragged about my new dress or my first violin or my grades. My lips stretched into a weak smile. I remembered those times, far away into my past, yet almost tangible.

The last diary, however, was nearly empty. I must have just started it when I was put in the machine. I checked the year. Almost 13 years ago. Very few words, spread across both pages, were carved into the paper with a very blunt pencil. Anger seethed through the crooked lines.

“I hate my life. I hate dad. I hate Jason. I hate music. I hate everything. I want to go back to normal. Why is this happening to me?”

I flipped back to the beginning and started reading.

“Hi. This diary sucks, but I suppose it fits because so does my life. My dad made me write because he said it’s gonna help me. It’s not helping. Bye.”

“I hate Jason so much. I don’t know why we keep seeing him. I want him to go away and leave me alone.”

Then I had sketched Jason in an unflattering manner, with huge ears, spikey hair, and pursed lips. He wore a coat with a name tag. His long, misshapen legs were stuck in a huge pile of seemingly warm (or smelly, or both) excrement. I had put a lot of details into the drawing, infinitely more than in composing my notes for the day.

The next day was consumed by a black void of pencil that had nearly torn the page, then a few more hateful proclamations towards various people and aspects of my life. The rest of the pages were blank.

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That brings me to now. My hand is in so much pain, even if I took what felt like hundreds of breaks. The clock on the wall tells me it’s midnight and I had started a little after two pm.

All that time, spent writing down everything that happened today, all the details, all the feelings. In case this is a dream, I feel like I would remember it better having written everything down, even inside the dream itself. It would be an interesting topic to discuss with Ixora, maybe, after she would reply. If she would reply.

Yet I have this unshakable feeling that everything I did, everything I had achieved was just an illusion and I really am just a twenty-two-year-old missing twelve years of her life.

My memories are mixing with each other, and I’m not even sure which ones are from my virtual life and which not. I don’t know how much control my father and Dalia had over me, while I was in there. Were my achievements mine? I have to make sure today wasn’t a dream, a virtual experience in itself.

I will find what happened. I will get answers to all my questions. After all, I have all the time in the world.

Thanks for reading!

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