The start
It wasn’t a shock, the first time she heard a second voice in her head. Shock was not enough to describe it. She was walking from her home to her car and when it came, she froze. Her body stiffened, her leg didn’t stretch far enough, her hands never tried to catch her fall. She froze and fell, her nose and glasses hitting the ground first.
She couldn’t help it: her body seized up as something in her head, in the space she considered hers, moved, shifted. Gave way. To not just another voice, a single person, a mind. No, it was more than that. It was a space, an ocean. Something without thought, entirely will. Forever moving, always growing, unconcerned, effortless. As she lay there bleeding, shaking now, a voice came together in the first words she heard that were not her own. ‘I wish I wasn’t here’. Her eyes swam, the blue sky seemed to pulse, the back of her head rolling on the parking lot ground. ‘Fuck this, why is it always me!‘…The voice silenced, she could hear herself think again, the fear making her thoughts race. Trembling, she slowly lifted herself off the ground, elbows first, one hand, another, barely keeping balance. ‘What the fuck was that’, she muttered.
A neighbour from across the parking lot saw her getting up, blood on her face, one of her glasses broken. She didn’t recognise him: didn’t they have that one kid, that black car? He helped her up, asked her what happened, she gave some vague response. The other voice was silent, but somehow she knew it wasn’t gone. The space, it was still there.
Settling in, pushing out. The neighbour would set her down on a concrete ridge next to the parking lot, get her some water, an ambulance maybe? She would say no, she was feeling better already, probably stress, not enough water in her system, some lie to make what happened less than it was. A doctor would advise her to take some sick leave, ask about any previous similar episodes, history of mental illness in her family. No one knew. She was the first. The voice would return. And with it, others. Always more.