Stranger than Facebook, my entry for the 11th Constrained Writing contest

It was such a struggle to get here. The mental hospitals were hard on me. Everyone was suffering but I always felt my struggles were so much different and at first it made me wonder why I was with the truly insane when I knew in my gut my insanity was truth?!

I became so angry at the other patients suffering their addictions and illnesses because I'd say, the voice I suffer is a real person.

And then they wanted to give me medicines to ease me into a coma of bliss or blindness and I learned to slip them under my tongue and spit them out later.

Truthfully I never was crazy until the therapist came and she actually convinced me you were false – all in my head. So I started to hate myself for making you up and putting my family and self through such agony.

And that was the true insanity, to hate who I was, to try to fit the mold of everyone else.

They had all been wrong. You are an actual real person. You were in my mind, a quirk of the universe, lodged in thoughts, only from birth on. They wondered why I spoke so early and with big words and complete sentences. But most of them were borrowed from your rich vocabulary.

I used to think everyone had an Emmy. I started calling the voice in my head Emmy at an early age. I had heard you call yourself Emma. But my difference went unnoticed for a long time.

Only other children noticed the eccentricity. I got beat up but would still ask them about their Emmy's.

Until high school when the guidance counselor had a psychiatrist talk to me and I went to my first hospital, perplexed but at first persistent.

Finally, I began missing the freedom of not being hospitalized and considered crazy, and thus learned to keep quiet about Emmy.

It worked so so long to be considered normal, while you puttered around my head, talking about your “silent retreats” and while you spent time meditating and I got more time to myself. But eventually I saw your thoughts word for word on my computer screen open to Facebook.

Shocked, I didn't know what to think. “Come for a quiet spell of writing at a warm professor's home.” I remembered when you wrote the expression in your head, just fifteen minutes prior, laughing gently to yourself at the play of words. Was the professor warm or the home? Nonetheless it was a distinct way of talking that only you possessed.

It was more than a coincidence. Wildly I noticed the poster of this sentence had posted it just 10 minutes earlier.

I breathed deep. It was too much to be a coincidence. I clicked. There I read about you, you were a professor in a college town in Kentucky, you had a real full name Emma Clemency, a husband Frank (who I'd already known in thoughts.)

A number of your thoughts, mostly related to silent retreats and writing events were posted right there on Facebook. Now what to do with my knowledge that you were real. Deep breaths.

It is strange how easy it could have been for me to get close enough to meeting you. The longer I thought about my options, the more sure I was that the particular path I wanted to take towards meeting you, did not involve telling you the truth or directly explaining my life to you. I guess I could have taken the night train to Kentucky, showed up on your stoop the next morning, and explained that you were the voice dwelling in my head. And maybe you would have been receptive, for you seemed an open minded person. But I realized more than having you know me, I wanted to know you. I wanted to be near enough to you that I could study you, understand you, make you my life's work, because the more I thought about it, my life would only be normal with you removed from it.

So that is how I found myself enrolling for your classes as a student at your school, moving my belongings in to your town, working long hours, and on nights and weekends, studying murder on the dark recesses of the Internet, because I planned to kill you. But I wanted to truly know you first. My wish was to remove your words from my head, but I also had a human curiosity in who you were, and I never had hurt another human being before you, so it frankly was an uphill battle to visualize myself killing you.

There you stood before me. I had managed to get into the Freshman advising group in your subject, English, and here were all of the students. The sullen ones stood in the back, calling you old, but most of the students murmured in the front, near to you, “Isn't she nice and smart and do you know her books are published.”

You were a petite woman, a grandmother, though I knew that your daughter in laws were actually just both expecting. You had the look of someone used to being looked over, but the demeanor of someone who only lowered her voice to get heard. You were warm and soft. “Kill, kill, kill.” I whispered to my brain. Then I reached out, as if I could not resist you, and welcomed you into the room with a hug.

Oh! Good to meet all of you. I brought a roster. Maybe you can pass this around. I began, my words circling the room from you to the classmates and coming around back to you.

@origninalworks @minnowsupport