Post by Talia Winchell on Dec 14, 2013 1:11:13 GMT -5
The last year and a half had been more of a rollercoaster than any other section of her life had been, and for once, Tal could find a little bit of peace. However, she still felt more unsettled than normal, and she attributed it to the fact that she was not used to being at peace with herself. It seemed, to her, like it could be the calm before the storm, and the daughter of Hermes was not sure whether she should be prepared or take advantage of the clearer skies.
She still wasn't completely ready to breeze through her home, jumping onto her bunk like she had done every other day of her life and settling back in like she hadn't been gone for a significant fraction of the year. But it seemed as though Tal didn't have a choice. She'd lied her way through half of the group therapy sessions, thrown away her own weapons, and surrendered to the sterile white walls. During one of the sessions with a doctor, he'd had her draw herself to scale. Afterwards, he asked her to lie down on the floor; he then traced her outline with a dull pencil. "What do you see?" he'd asked afterwards, clipboard poised, ready to strike.
"Well, the one I drew of myself is unrealistic. I need to work on seeing myself the way I actually am." The doctor had cracked a smile, writing down her every word in spidery doctor's scrawl. In reality, they both looked the same to her: big, gangly, ugly, yet too clean to even resemble her. She wasn't washed white; her body was in no way as clean or unblemished as the paper. At this point, she would be ready and willing to focus on anything but herself.
Bullshit. She was calm enough, but the only reason she had been discharged was because she'd lied. She was being honest with herself but not with anybody else and, though Tal knew it was unhealthy, it was reflex. Untruths were habitual. And how fucked up was that? She had no idea where any of this had started. It was all a blur to her.
And now, here she was, watching the unclear city lights fly past like acidic angels. The back of a van, with nobody to keep her company. For whatever reason, she couldn't be picked up by Dylan or Em or even Jamian. There was no big master reunion with her siblings. She was stuffed in a van and driven back to camp; she had informed the hospital directors that her family owned Delphi Strawberries. For whatever reason, they'd eaten it up like free poison.
-
At long last, after the van had disappeared back into the winter dusk, Tal trudged up the long path and breathed in the scent of camp in wintertime. She'd forgotten the way you could feel the gentle frost, the cold kissing your bare skin as you moved. It smelled of home, and yet... it was all so alien to her, as though some sort of invisible spirit had spread over the camp in her absence.
Trudging through the hills seemed to take some effort, but it was all worth it when it hit her heart that she really was home. Through thick and thin, the Big House with its peeling paint and the cabins with their rowdy occupants and the fire in the Mess Hall had always been there for her. There was a nice sort of feeling that she got from routine, especially since the things in her life she usually would consider routine seemed to fluctuate so wildly. Nevertheless, she barely spared the Big House a glimpse as she hurried by; the place was full of depressing memories, and this was the wrong time to relive them. She could almost smell the infirmary medicines, mingling with the stifling summer air.
And then it was gone. There were no fallen leaves to pound to dust with her heels; there was only frost. When she reached the Hermes cabin, the door was shut. It was only then that she realized she felt like an outsider.
Hell, this had been her home for so long. And then she'd been carted off to the fucking insane asylum, for lack of gentler word, where they'd poked her and prodded her and force-fed her, where she couldn't do one thing without being monitored by the young nurses who already had worry lines on their scarless foreheads. She felt like a robot, going through the motions - this was not her. Who was she nowadays, anyway? There wasn't much to be said for Tal Winchell. She was whoever the people around her shaped her to be.
Raising her hand and balling it into a fist, making sure that her long sleeves stayed put in the process, she rapped tentatively on her home's door. Who knew if she would still be accepted here, anyway?