Chapter 2

Noelle is the schizophrenic girl that my psychiatrist induced me to talk to. She didn't talk to anyone, she was always curled up in a corner and hugging her own body.

It didn't give me confidence when I asked if everything was okay, nor when I said she called me Abby, although she smiled briefly and called me "A-Bee", saying that she had never heard of a single person who was called "Bee".

It took some time for Noelle to know that I was as - or even more - crazy as she was. It was one of my worst days. Emily, one of my personalities, wouldn't stop crying in my ears and murmured something I couldn't hear right.

I felt an ever-increasing need to hit my head on the ground until it cracked. Today I have a slight suspicion that this is what Emily told me to do.

It was at the moment that I threw myself on the floor of the recreation room and supported both hands to throw my head against the hard and cold ceramics that I felt a hand on my shoulders.

I turned my head only until I could see who was around and came across the girl with broken hair and bulging eyes. She was kneeling next to me and held me so tightly that I could hardly believe that someone like her could have such a strong grip.

"The trick is... Occupy your mind... With banal details..." She said slowly, still with a frightened expression on her face. "That's what... I do... With the voices, I hear."

The surprise I felt was so great that I moved my hands away from the sides of my head and sat down. Noelle still held my shoulder very tightly, her expression softening little by little.

Emily seemed as surprised as I was because her crying slowed down until she got completely lost in a dark corner of my head.

"You... See... That chair?" Noelle pointed with her chin to a forgotten chair in the corner of the huge hall. "You... Have you ever wondered... why... Doesn't anyone sit on it?"

I looked in the direction of the chair and frowned, really trying to understand what Noelle wanted to say. After almost an eternity staring at the chair, I thought that facing objects that had nothing wrong was just another consequence of being schizophrenic. Noelle held my face before I diverted my attention.

"I like to imagine... What can... It happened... So that people... Reject... Things... Or..." She stopped, staring at the chair. He swallowed it dry and took a breath to continue. "I like it... To occupy my mind... Pretending I can... Find a way... To fix the flaws."

None of that made sense. Out of compassion, I fixed my eyes on the chair and almost automatically found a deformity in one of the metal legs. The legs of the chair seemed to have opened when someone who weighed more than she was able to bear, sat down.

It had been repaired precariously and a mark of this was that one of the left legs was still bent, leaving the chair more inclined to the left, like a tired person who leans on one foot.

"The left leg." I noticed, looking at the lost expression on Noelle's face. "It looks bent as if the chair had given under someone's weight."

Noelle diverted her attention from the chair and analyzed my face. Her lips stretched in a little smile and she let go of my shoulder.

"I heard... That's the chair... I was in the living room... From Mrs. Willie."

Mrs. Willie was as the other patients called Maisie. I never called her by her last name, just because she hated any intimacy with patients and I loved to complicate her life.

"Do you mean that the cow weighs as much as a cow?" I asked with a forced naturalness. Noelle laughed when I laughed too. I realized that day that if there was one thing that crazy people loved to do, it was laugh at dull jokes.

"If... She... heard you..." Noelle shook her head and took a deep breath to control her laughter. His laugh was a funny sound, like the mixture between a child's laugh and the purring of a cat.

Noelle began to get up slowly, leaning one of her hands on the ground and pushing for her body to straighten.

"A-Bee... You... Already... It was... To the... garden of daisies?"

I denied it with my head. She jumped and stretched out her right hand. I smiled and held his outstretched hand without any hesitation. We went together to the daisy garden and, to this day, the perfume of flowers she uses reminds me of that afternoon.

I remember that after several days of sharing our vacant schedules with useless reports made in the garden of colorful flowers or talking about life, I learned that Noelle was twenty-two years old and that she had gone crazy at thirteen, after years of abuse committed by the woman she called grandmother.

Her parents and brother died when she was still a child, leaving her alone with an unhappy and embittered woman.

At that time, about two years ago, Noelle was one of the few people I'd ever heard of not being afraid of her disease.

I came to think that when we are at the bottom of the well any trace of hope becomes enough for us to feel good. I thought Noelle felt good about having madness as a salvation, when in fact it was a consequence of the horrors that her large blue-gray eyes tried to hide.

But it was during the night when everyone went to their rooms and the silence fell on the clinic like a large dusty sheet, in which I heard his poignant and full of rancor scream echo and cross the walls of my room. Noelle screamed because she had vivid memories of all her trauma when I couldn't even say for sure who I was.

When I close my eyes and feel the parts in my head changing, I associate this with the gears of a huge watch. No one can see them if they don't open it, just as no one can know what's wrong with me if they don't try to get closer.

The gears rotate and are the hour and minute hands that point to the personality that will come next. I can be the cheerful little boy who slides on the floor, joining his lips and imitating the sound of a car engine: "Vrum!".

The sarcastic teenager throws her long hair back while dancing to a song that only she can hear. I can be the one who is always bragging about her intelligence and murmurs how much she misses flipping through the pages of a book.

I can get up in a hurry and run to the darker corner of the room, wrapping myself in a ball and crying loudly as I cover my face with my arms.

The pointer can fall on the girl with spiteful eyes and dry lips who roars with the overwhelming pain that reaches her fragile bones, or else, I can walk from one side to the other and murmur my plans for the future, feel a false sense of joy and get attached to her.

Sometimes I'm not someone else, I'm a kind of shell, empty and dispensable. I pursue my dreams as if they were crumbs of my past and keep all the pains of loss inside me.

Even when the voices appear and belittle my good coexistence with other people, I hold my scream and fake emotional stability that I never had.

Every night my mind is too disturbed by the silence outside and the noisy party that happens inside.

So, I close my eyes tightly and imagine that the day will come when, like Noelle, my inner demons will become memories and I will finally release the cry that will serve as a shield to face and understand my insane side. Even if that means my fall.