The Vanishing Act - The Return Part 2

If you missed the first part of The Vanishing Act - The Return you may want to click the link below and read it before continuing:

The Vanishing Act - The Return Part 1

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I waited five thousand years for this, you stupid girl, the demon doll hissed.

Waited for what? echoed dully in my thoughts.

For someone who hated her life enough to throw it away!

Is that what this is, a cosmic waste dump where those of us who are invisible are compelled to dwell? Surely, I thought, someone waited for me to awaken back into the real world, whether I remembered anything from that life or not.

But this was not a fairy tale, and I was not Sleeping Beauty. Even in the days before my memory fully returned, I knew at some deep level that no one I knew would greet me when I awakened.

If this dark and soulless place was me, surely, I thought I might find something memorable if I only I wandered long enough, something that would give me a moment of joy however brief.

Instead, I remembered the Yellow Desert, the sentinel stones looming like shadows in the cold night. I remembered my father's voice crying out in agony when I walked away.

I remembered the many, many lies he told. The many lies everyone I ever loved whispered in my naive ears.

I felt my resignation deeply. Why awaken at all if my lot was the disappointment that drove me into cruel darkness to begin with? Suffused with a lonely melancholy, I wondered, Is this all there ever was of me?

Remembering the desert sun high in the cloudless sky while I staggered breathlessly forward, I knelt again in the sand and vomited over and over as if doomed to relive the very worst moments of my life till I surrendered fully to the darkness.

And when I spewed chunks of that nasty doll into the sand, what did I learn when I tried press her back together again? What did I learn when the wind driven sand rent my clothes and flesh till my bones were left to bleach in the hot sun?

I did not learn anything good. Every memory conjured was bad. Every emotion brought only a sense of great and pointless loss.

No meaning existed in this formless void; no hope dwelled in the darkness upon the faceless deep. But when my formless voice howled with grief much like my father's had in the cold desert night, I finally awakened something within my great subterranean depths.

It stirred slow and painfully, like a monstrous leviathan of old, its voice ancient and hoarse with disuse. And within that voice I could hear a reason to live again.

A reason to be. A reason to return.

Within those hoarse cries I heard my true voice stillborn within me, the emotions it awakened long suppressed and forgotten.

Memory of selfhood penetrated the walls that had long protected me from the truth.

Awakening from my self-imposed stupor, I felt my rage trembling to be heard in the stirring of that monster hidden by the darkness. My darkness, I thought, as if revelation from on high.

But I did not awaken until I was ready to give shape and form to the terrible wrath trembling within me. I did not awaken till it was ready to face the light.

I did not awaken until I was ready to seek a reckoning. Will my enemies see me coming? I wondered. Does anyone ever see those of us who are invisible?

This thought stirred a fierce and unexpected joy, and for the first time I knew that I contained multitudes.

My enemies may not have seen me before, but I swore that they would see me now if it's the last thing they ever did!

The Vanishing Act - The Return Part 3