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I sit cross-legged on the floor of a room with bare walls, a twin-sized bed and a night stand. No life in these walls, colorless. The journal I’m allowed to write in feels silly with every word written in the format of a child – this pesky blue Crayon with a flattened tip. Last week I used a green one, but that one didn’t last long either. None of them ever do. Just like the medicine the staff gave me at 7:30 this morning. I’m not sure what they think some small pills will do to take away the girl that visits me every day. It doesn’t work, probably never will. And yet again, I wonder why I’m here. If I’ll ever get out. I look up at the singular window in the room, barred with steel, taking away any hope of escape.	“The sky is very blue today, have you seen it? Not the pretty kind of blue, though. It’s like your Crayon there. Dreary, not light enough to invoke joy, just dark enough to make you remember how things will never be as bright as this room you’re stuck in.” I turn to look at the familiar presence. She looks almost like me, but with unruly hair, a tattered white dress, droopy eyes. She’s nameless. Just another visitor inside my head that no one else knows about.	“I’ll get to see it today. When they let us out into the garden,” I say.&nbsp;	“And yet, there’s no point. You’ll just end up right back here. A trip to the garden will not give you any hope of getting out of here. It’s just a means of showing you what you don’t have.”	“Why are you like this? Why do you visit me if only to say mean things?” I ask, closing my journal and staring up at this expressionless girl through an underwater lens.	“Because I’m you. I only speak your thoughts, Anna. We are the same, you and I.” She gives me a sad smile and I fling the journal at her, willing her away, but she disappears as the journal falls onto the floor. I hear the electronic lock on the door, cock my head to the side. It only unlocks at certain times during the day, like when the staff brings us our meals, or what they call “free time” where we do things like play games in the rainbow room downstairs, or when we are called down to take our meds in front of a stone-faced old lady who insures we actually take them.	I stand up on wobbly legs, wait for them to steady after sitting for hours, and make my way to the door. The handle moves and I walk out into the hallway. The floor is empty, the lights flicker on and off above me. As I make my way down the hall, doors stand wide open, rooms vacant. Not a sound besides the soft thuds of my socked feet on the floor.	“Where do you think they all have gone?” The girl appears beside me again and I sigh, a heavy weight in my chest every time she is around.	“I don’t know. Maybe I’m finally dead and this is the afterlife,” I joke, knowing it’s not true no matter how much that freedom would appease me.	“Or you’re having another episode. Or maybe you’re all alone. Imprisoned with no means of ever getting out, or laughing with a friend, or ever having hope those pills they give you might work some day.”	“Shut up!” I scream and swipe at her with all the force in my body, only to tumble forward and catch myself on the wall. She’s gone, again. I catch my breath and head down to the garden, finding the door to the outside unlocked like all the rest of them. I step out to a world of color and life, only to watch it quickly decay into grays and a pit of dying nature. The flowers wilt, the bees and butterflies tumble to their deaths on the ground. Except one lone butterfly. Its color hangs on by a thread, a paling yellow on the one wing. The other has seemingly ripped off and it’s fluttering at the pace of a heart pumped full of caffeine. It’s a dreadful sight, watching it try to carry on like its hope of flying normal again wasn’t torn away.	“Help it, Anna. There is no hope for that poor little thing.” The voice in my head is no longer a figure alongside me, but just that. A voice. I reach up to the flying creature and watch it land in the palm of my hand, taking a rest from its aspiration to get back to a normal life.&nbsp;	I ball my fist and crush its hope.	Alarms ring all around me, echoing in my ears, drowning out the sound of her voice telling me that the butterfly is just like me now. Hopeless. I’m pulled back through the door of the garden and watch it fade away when it springs back to life – color returning as the insects resume their happy lives. Then, everything around me goes black and I hear her again. Singing songs of dread, her voice filled with a sense of melancholy that I allow myself to be drawn to.&nbsp;	When I wake, I’m back in my room, back on the floor with a black Crayon in my hand. I look around the room, feeling it resonate that I must have had another episode. That stupid medicine still doesn’t work. I feel something in my other hand and open it, the emptiness taking over my body spreads and for once the voice in my head is quiet as I detach from it and become one with the thing I am holding.	A hopeless and dead, one-winged, yellow butterfly.

The Butterfly

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The Butterfly

xndeadahead

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Ricky Hollow

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