RainyDayPurples

The white noise goes out. It’s completely silent as I wait in my cell. I pull out of the memory of the grey eyed woman and focus on the reality of my white cell. The door stays shut. The bed doesn’t move. Nothing has changed but the empty silence where the white noise used to be. I stand up to look at the vent. It’s just a square set in the wall above my bed. I stand on the bed and reach up to touch the vent. Nothing changes. It is cool under my fingers. Metal. I feel around the edges. My fingernails catch on the seam between wall and vent. I pull. It’s another memory. One that has dimmed with time. Ava pulling at a grate in the street. Something following her, chasing. She pulls up the grate and drops down. Darkness swallowing her as she drops into safety. The dark memories are my favorite ones. So different from the reality of stark white walls, white guards, the white chair. The vent pops off in my hands. I stare at it, turning it over and looking at the

The woman with the grey eyes is the strongest. She stays by me while the other memories filter in and out of my mind. I hug her. Tight, so tight that when I wake I touch my cheek to feel if the pattern of the gingham is pressed into my skin. It isn’t. The white guard comes again. As I’m hooked up to the port, I stare at the visor. Is there a human inside? The memory of that elbow cracking into the visor is strong. Was there a face beneath? I fade into blackness as the memories seep in. There are voices, indistinct. The person-who-is-not-me is eating. I can identify the foods, bread, jerky, tepid water. I’ve never tasted them except in memory. There is a port in my abdomen where nurishment flows in, like the memories flow through the port in my neck. A light shines into the room. My person looks up, sees the young man from last time, scoots over for him to sit. “Ava,” he says. My person has a name! I know the joy is me, not the memory. Why should my

My mind is not my own. I remember a house with a blue door, and yellow flowers on long stems bobbing in the window box. I remember a woman with grey eyes and a gingham apron hugging me tight to her chest as tears flow down her cheeks. I have never met her. I have never been to this place. At night I lay in my cell and try to find something in my mind that is actually mine. Something before the endless white that is this place. Have I ever been free of this cell? Did someone love me? Love me as fiercely as the woman with grey eyes loves the girl in my memories, the person-who-is-not-me? The door of the cell opens and the white guard stands, still and silent, in the doorway. I stand and follow, not because the white guard says anything, but because I always have. It’s habit. Not memory. My body knows what to do. I just do what my body tells me. We walk down white hallways. More white guards stand in doorways, visors down so white is all I see. They have no