Madwoman in the Attic

(I’m trying to get back into writing so here u go, this was inspired by jane eyre by charlotte bronte and also some random friends of mine irl tw suicide cutting etc)

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I awoke one night to a frightful vision of a girl of my past brought back to haunt me at the foot of my bed. I had no cause to fear this creature, for we had been friends in the flesh, but I regarded her a grim shade nevertheless for virtue of her being almost certainly otherworldly. Instinctive fear raced through my veins to get out, yet my muscles remained paralyzed and locked under the covers. A faint smell of burning assaulted my nostrils, and the distinctive mixture of her peculiar scent I would recognize anywhere overwhelmed my senses: jasmine, Camels, marijuana, and Chanel No. 5. She stood at the foot of my bed, a petite figure swathed in black. Her face was blurry except for slanted emerald eyes and feathery black hair which rested at the curve of her back. My nightlight flickered just enough for me to make out that it was, indeed, She. I remember the girls at Phillips Exeter Academy used to call her “sickly” and “skeletor” for her slimness. For this shade, who had once been my best friend (and altogether Living), had been paper thin yet so beautiful that she often provoked the jealousy of our peers.

Veign-y, fairylike creature of opiate blood and xanax eyes! Why visit me, _______, of all people, to torment? Why not torment your oppressors, the girls who used to shove and bully you? Why pick me, when we were such good friends in life?

I remember back at the Academy the day she disappeared without a trace, or even a goodbye. I had been at my internship and never did attend her disciplinary hearing, upon which she was pronounced guilty and promptly asked to vacate her dormitory.

“We saw her crying hysterically as her parents dragged her away,” the witnesses later told me in hushed, ecstatic whispers. They almost felt sorry for the wretched imp-like creature that they had so despised when she had attended the school. Now that she was gone for good, they had afforded her with that wonderful, legendary status granted to only the school’s most notorious inmates.

That beautiful fairylike drug addict. I see her now trapped in the attic of my mind’s eye, pacing through the windowless rooms of my consciousness; animalistic, clawing to get out, screeching the discordant laughter of IT, whatever It was. For all the world to know what lurks inside this gated estate of restraint and respectability, I couldn’t bear it – Free her, a voice deep inside tells me, free her and destroy everything.

I firmly hold that my dear friend was never meant for this world or its institutions, and her departure from the earthly world was inevitable. There was nothing any of us could have done. She was not meant for the Academy, nor University, nor an office, nor even a rehabilitation center or hospital. No prison dressed up like Bluebeard’s castle.

Nowadays I envision her wandering dream-like through English moors under a wide-open sky dark blue as twilight, or perched serenely as a siren on a half-submerged shipwreck with clouds low and livid under a roiling sea.

Never a corpse with singed hair and slit wrists.

Her words echo faintly in my head as I am now held, paralyzed in my dressing gown, by the gaze of those haunted emerald eyes at the foot of my bed. She does not speak, but her meaning claws into my thoughts: Let’s burn everything, you and I. It’s the only way to start over. Watch this place burn and our mad, broken dreams die within it.

Tempting, but by this point I have regained control of my limbs. Trembling and shaken, I switch on the light, and there is nothing more there but the faint scent of jasmine and hash.