Page 25 of Marked By His Hunger
I had come here for one reason.
Control.
Not containment. Not sedation. Not to be told again that what I saw wasn’t real.
Absolute control.
Because I had already lived the alternative.
Too many white rooms.
Too many soft voices speaking slowly, carefully, like I might shatter if they used the wrong word.
Too many notebooks filled with observations about me—about symptoms—as if my life could be reduced to bullet points and diagnoses.
Visual hallucinations.
Auditory disturbances.
Grief-induced delusion.
Early childhood trauma response.
They always circled back to that.
My parents.
As if losing them explained everything.
As if grief could conjure shadows that whispered my name when no one else was around.
As if trauma could explain the way the air changed when something unseen entered a room.
As if imagination could account for the things I knew—deep in my bones, in a place no medication ever managed to touch.
I wasn’t imagining them.
They were there.
Always.
Watching.
Waiting.
Sometimes… reaching.
I learned quickly not to say that out loud.
The first time I told Aunt Gabby, I was eight.
I remember the way her smile froze—how her hand tightened around mine just a little too hard. The way she glanced at Uncle Patrick like I’d said something wrong, not something true.
After that came the appointments.
Days turned into weeks.
Weeks turned into years.
