Grandma?

It's been two hours. She drones on. I cannot help but listen. A lifetime of vague implications my family was cursed, confirmed by one bizarre encounter.

I cannot find the feeling of fear inside me anywhere. She drones on. I think she - it, needs someone to talk to. My bedside table holds my folder from my voluntary inpatient psychiatric visit, diagnosis of disorder in plain view. She/it drones on about it.

I am familiar with long sleep paralysis. I am unfamiliar with an episode lasting two hours with zero fear. My body is relaxed. I cannot view this as a malicious curse. There has been no movement from the foot of my bed beyond a mouth forming words. My physical safety feels real.

Two hours, it's been. I've never been in a conversation where I was not the predominant speaker. This entity presumably precedes me, that is the reason I cannot bring myself to be the dominant speaker. I was after her, I can wait my turn. I am only a concept of a person at any given moment. A feeling identified. What a concept, my silence. A concept nobody sans she and it have seen actualized.

She drones on. It needs someone to talk to. The Victorian nightgown looks akin to my Mother's infamous nightgowns and I realize it must be who she says it is. The speech is disorganized, like mine - hard to parse through, almost impossible to process in real time.

I don't think it gets it. I don't care whether it is real or not. A maternal figure, one I was never blessed with meeting, has chosen me to spew her schizophrenic thoughts on. I can feel them soaking into me, yet I can't... I can't identify what ideals or stories are currently saturating me. The bed feels wet. Two hours for one decade of progress to be scrapped, I haven't wet the bed since I was fifteen. I never even felt the release.

It drones on about it. The Victorian nightgown seems strangely fitted in a boxy, unflattering way. I did not feel my rise to level with it, yet it happened. Sitting upwards in my sister's bed, where did my sister go? I can move after hours. I could have moved the entire time. It just feels like any of my days, blurred, unimportant, and above all, wholly unbelievable.

I can see the staining on its gown. Blood, yet not alarming. I look down, and I can see the staining on my nightwear. My urinary tract track record preserved, my maternal grandmother and I's menstrual track broken. It drones on about it.

Oh. The curse. The mark of Cain. Bound by blood. We are not grandmother and granddaughter, hallucinator and hallucinatee. We are brothers, bound in blood. It drones on and completes the binding of itself to me. I did not realize what process was occurring.

The only negative feeling I harbor is a sense of confusion. Brother, mother, grandmother, sister, one should never coerce a mentally unwell individual away from therapy. It shakes me to my core; it heard my heart's value questioned.

One of my only Precious Moments with my grandmother. One piece of precious advice, from a life denied, a life scorned. My grandfather.

One hour long were his therapy sessions. His time wasn't ready to grant him existence. Neither was my mother/father's. Two hours, one each for lives not granted a true experience. They attach to me, and I feel my heart start to carry them, the muscles beating harder and bounding stronger by each beat.

"All therapy converts."

Brothers, man I am not - man I appear. Find solace in me, live through me - I'll only ever pay you in the mind you should have had to begin with.