The Mirrorverse
Chapter 8

Ellie

The drab hospital ward was silent except for the sound of Ellie’s soft voice, and the muffled breathing of its six inmates, who lay there in their beds as if only asleep. The green drapes at the window did nothing to brighten up the dull area where the comatose patients were situated in beds neatly lined up in rows of three.

“Please come back to me,” begged Ellie, gripping Maya’s hand as if for dear life. “The world doesn’t make sense without you.”

Tears dripped down her cheeks as she beheld her friend. Ellie had had her back for just a while, but lost her again just as fast. Ellie arose from Maya’s bedside, her shift as a nursing auxiliary long since finished without her presence. She had abandoned it mid-shift as she had been notified that Maya was awake, and had ran through the long corridors of St. Lukes psychiatric hospital to greet her friend. Now her friend had returned to her state of stupor, and no amount of tears or love could bring her back. That was something only Maya could do.

Wiping the tears from her face, Ellie cast a backward look at her friend’s angelic form, her beautiful dark hair falling around her face giving her the look of someone only sleeping. Someone that would awake at any moment, with the vigour only Maya could bring.

It had been a long time since Maya had been well. A long long time, but Ellie had never given up, at least not until after they said Maya would never wake up. They were fourteen when it started. Thick as thieves, they’d been kicking around together since they had met on the first day of preschool, aged four. All of Ellie’s early memories had Maya in them, in one way or another. From the age of ten, they would play music together, Maya on the piano, such a gifted creature she was. Ellie would play along on her cello, but lost the will to play it when Maya got sick.

She started talking of shimmery silver things floating in mid-air. Then she claimed it took her places beyond her control, to magical worlds, parallel universes and the like. By the age of eighteen her psychosis was so severe that she no longer lived in the same world as Ellie. She spent time in psychiatric wards, was given every medication there was but still the psychoses persisted. She still believed in the terrible worlds she was forced into. And the running away, she would escape the hospital or her parent’s home and roam for who knows how long in lord knows where, returning covered with self-inflicted wounds, claiming they were the work of creatures in other worlds.

It was late, so Eliie got a seat on the tube, as the carriage was nearly empty. That suited her just fine, she didn’t need people around her during her sombre recollections of a beautiful life ruined by madness. Ellie tried everything she could to make Maya realise that it was all in her head. Ellie pursued a career in psychology to help her, and others like her. Ellie did her Master’s thesis on Maya, but she suspected it wasn’t the best idea for her, dredging it all back up again. And now Maya had awoken, given her hope then left again. Left her all alone.

Careworn, Ellie sat there with her head in her hands, torn apart by the re-opened wound that was a Maya she had been trying to get over. Now she had awoken, it all rushed to the surface again, the hope, and yet lack of, that she would one day be well, one day be her old Maya again.

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