The Prisoner Project

AWARENESS II

    
"Real love – the one not spewed in poetry – is agony. It tears at your soul, strips you bare, drives you mad and demands the veracity of our existence. Love is madness."

— Trisha Wolfe, Born, Madly

AWARENESS II

IT WAS AN ULTIMATELY DEPRAVED FEELING to know that your son was different even before he had done a single thing. It was obvious in the way his eyes would flash, and his lips would upturn whenever he would do things that upset, angered and triggered me. Perhaps this was my punishment for defying Gods wishes and adopting a son, even after he gave me no womb to bear one of my own.

I had decided not to change his name, but I gave him my last name.

"You're no longer just Nicholas. You have a family now, so you have two names." I explained as I sewed his name onto his new school uniform.

His dark eyes glinted in a mix between excitement and disbelief. He was only four then, and he wasn't very bright. But, I would soon realise that what he lacked in smarts, he was brilliant in other unnatural ways. "What's my new name?"

"Dementia. Nicholas Dementia, my love." I whispered, spreading out the uniform shirt onto his bed so he could see how it looked. He would be starting school late. But what I feared didn't have to do with how well he would catch up, it was about what he would do.

Nicholas blinked at me for a few seconds. A thing he did whenever he processed new information. It was a strange thing, the way a child's mind worked. "Thank you, Lorraine."

"Call me mom." I smiled with high hopes that this would work. I would no longer be alone. I had my baby. I had chosen him despite the orphanage advising me not to. I had chosen him because I knew what it felt to be abandoned.

I leaned down and kissed his mass of dark curls. "I'm going to be your new mom." When I pulled away, I watched the recognition alight his chubby face. "If you'd let me."

Nicholas gasped softly, and then he grinned. Wide and awfully beautiful. "Okay." — and he leaned over to me with cupped little hands and whispered into the shells of my ears. "But you're gonna regret it."

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    DIANA HAD NOT SLEPT since she had visited SSCD. She knew that Aria had not read the letter she slipped to her, because if she had, she would've called and questioned. She would've been on the next train home, and Diana wouldn't be a nocturnal animal, unable to sleep because of the rage and guilt swimming inside her psyche.

Diana knew that Aria often overlooked the most important things. She knew that Aria could just take that letter, sealed and unopened, and gone to search for the address. But this one time, she wished that Aria would be smarter than this. She wished that her fear would make her alert and she would be curious enough to read the damn thing.

Diana blindly reached for the photo she kept underneath her pillow. It was a family picture. She had to have been five in that picture, with pig tails and a birthday hat. She traced her finger over her mother's face, over her fathers face, over Hugh's face. Fuck.

She had once believed that she hated them all, but that was all a lie. It was the reason she told no one about her fathers affair, it was why she constantly reassured her mother that they were fine, it was why she tolerated Hugh's abuse, and sympathised with Aria. She loved them, despite it all. She didn't want to lose her family. She had tolerated all of the shit, all of the fucking shit, but the second she told Aria, it had all been for nothing.

Because Aria let the cat out of the bag, and then came chaos.

"It's all your fault." Her nails scraped against the edge of the photo where Arias face had once been. "And Christ, I hate you for doing this to me. I fucking begged you to let it go."

Diana tucked the photo back under her pillow and groaned. She felt hot tears against her skin and felt frustration bubble up. All the feelings her therapist had asked her to tackle were uprising. Revenge. Pain. Hatred. Depression.

She had once believed that she had tackled them, but then the first letter came to her, and she fucking knew that nothing would tear her away from the rage within her. It was fiery, vermilion, scalding and blinding.

It had been sent from M.

And soon, Dante became a pseudonym for M.

And just like her, Dante craved revenge for the exact same reasons.

Diana stood up from her single bed, and paced around the small room. All her lies, deception, and disguise had come to a crescendo the second she had slipped the false newspaper advertisement into Arias' bag. She knew Arias pathetic curiosity would be eager to do something as bizarre as TPP so it would fill the hole in her gaping heart.

"FUCK!" Diana yelled, kicking her dressing table so hard that the mirror shattered against the wooden floor. She picked up her phone, and wondered if she had done the right thing. "Fuck."

Dianas room was tiny, and clustered, not by material things but by emotions. The walls strained, the floor screamed when they walked, and the windows had cracks. The tension, the stress, the guilt, and pain that lived inside the room had been growing for five years and now, it had come alive. They say emotions don't weigh a thing but that was fallacy. It became a colossal thing that stretched the realms of their apartment. It was huge, and black. It was flesh, bones, skin, soul, sweat, veins, scars, flaws.

It had pushed them into corners and made them feel tiny.

It had eaten Diana alive.

In the silence of the tragic room, Diana whispered. "Fuck."

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Things will be clearer soon, my loves! Exam season and Christmas has kept me busy. Please, vote and comment on this uber short chapter.