Maeve's Bedroom

My name is apparently not important to THEM. They never call me anything. In my head I call myself Maeve. It rhymes with Fave and Gave and that is exactly how I feel. I give and I give; I give of myself. Do this and do that when asked. I don’t have many friends and sometimes I feel so very alone. I wish I was one of those schoolgirls who wears too much hairspray, holds too many books and chews gum way too fast.

My Maeve would have way too many friends, is overconfident, a beautiful dream dish who likes to pretend. My Maeve would have gotten all dressed up in that short sparkly red dress and would have just walked out of that door that Saturday night, instead of trying to claw her way back into her bedroom to become a comfortable recluse. She also would have answered Jessica’s last message when she asked, “Are you really going to stay here again?”

I vaguely recollect when the walls stopped feeling like a cage. Six sides. They felt smooth and I could somehow see through them like opaque carnival glass. The floor felt heated and I could almost touch the ceiling if I stood on my bed. I always felt the most comfortable here. Now that I think about it, I’m always here. I don’t really want to ever leave. Ever. It’s always warm here, unless there’s a draft. I don’t mind it though when there is a cool breeze, because it feels like fresh air. I don’t want to admit it but there always seems to be an acrid stench that feels like a solid that only I can masticate. Most of the air here in my room is artificial and filtered, so new fresh air is a welcome relief. There’s always a low hum, it never stops, a white noise like an unwanted guest with that ever-present otherworldly fluorescent light.

Time is irrelevant. It only makes sense when I review her messages as a time marker to see if she still exists and is alive. I’m just a number to her and wonder if Jessica really even cares about me anymore. Mostly, I spend the day away eating faded pastel Easter candy and drinking. Drinking water so clean and pure that it has an absence of personality. I don’t even know where my food comes from. I don’t even care if I am fat anymore. I don’t know how I can be, as my food portions are small and rationed. I remembered eating real food once when I was young, vegetables, fruit, nuts and berries.

I would love to have a friend I can trust. But the other girls don’t really like me too much. I see them walk by me without even glancing at me. They all ignore me. I pass the time recording my thoughts as drawings and writing in my head as I don’t have any paper or pencils. I outline and trace girls who look nothing like me -- girls with straight backs and gentle laughs. Girls whose hands are pretty and don’t tremble when they present them. I think it’s better to write as I can work through my feelings and thoughts in an orderly fashion. I mostly play video games. Jessica is always busy, but she does play with me occasionally when she can. Otherwise, everything is chaos.

I write long mental notes and send them to Jessica a couple of times a week, hoping she’ll respond. Something like in my video games, where I can die and come back to life. I “Reload” In my games where people talk to me and chat, and then I can pretend to be someone else all over again. Someone tall and witty, smart and popular. Someone everyone wants to be with. Someone like Maeve. Fourteen months or fourteen years old, my timeframe betrays me. I’m hungry again, sugar and salt sound good right now. Sweet and sour a metaphor for my life. Damn you, Jessica! Didn’t you say you were coming over and we’d play or we’d go out? Who is that boy you were with when he said, “You gave her everything. Perfect nutrition. Perfect temperature. Perfect isolation from every stressor she could ever encounter in her world”

What were you two talking about when you responded, “If she can’t finally find herself and rediscover her basic primal instinct, I’m letting her go. She will never return to her room”

I wanted to scream at you Jessica. Your puerile attempt to shift blame rather than offer solutions had me question our relationship. Maybe the “instinct” wasn’t missing from me, maybe just maybe, it was missing from you. YOU lost it Jessica. You burned out, you and that boyfriend of yours incinerated that instinct forever first. I’m not moving from here; I’m not leaving my room. You’ve suffocated me, you’ve always tried drowning me in your slow sweet syrup.

You’ve kept me silent. You made me dependent on that white noise. Now I know why. I was never supposed to become like you. I was never supposed to be like one of the girls. Like them. I was supposed to remind all of you what it was like to be normal before phones, cameras, computers, Tik Toks and Instagrams. Yes, of course I like instant gratification, who doesn’t? But to you and to them, all of you always must be in control, all of you can never let go.

Now I understand why. I wasn’t failing to become human. You wanted me to teach all of you how to feel alone. To be and feel isolated and to never break. Everyone wanted me to fail. Why? Who was the failure? Me? Never. Not because I was broken, but because this is all I’ve ever known.

I crawled to the center of my room and curled up into a fetal position with my tail wrapped twice as tight as it would go around my ankle. I always told myself that my tail was just a birthmark. Something I hid like a goiter under an oversized hoodie. I had pretty ears, Jessica had always said so, as I thought so too. My soft tiny pink ears were pinned flat by my trembling small, clawed hands. My fingers, bony and seemingly arthritic with grey nails that looked too long, grown well past a rigamortis that would surely come too soon. My whiskers twitched as I squeezed my eyes shut, not letting any light in, but the glare somehow seeped in through my pale translucent eyelids.

I don’t know who Jessica and her boyfriend were revealing themselves to be? I kept telling myself that maybe we’d play our game again but silently prayed they wouldn’t kill me. On the other side of the glass that human voice I thought I knew broke into a whisper. She said something about ethics and freedom.

On that night - Or morning, I knew not the hour; I pressed my body against my intimate wall. I fell through it like a transport hole into another dimension. There no longer was a wall. I was alone again, but this time somehow free. Free to move on my own to simply walk away from this falsity and deception of the spirit. I did just that and gathered up my courage as the fluorescence faded behind me.

It was then I finally realized a noogenesis in my short life: The loneliest creature in this experiment called life isn’t the one born in a cage. It’s the ones who built it.