Holding On To Heaven

by Melyssa Winchester

  Chapter One

  Serenity

  As far back as I can remember I've heard voices. My earliest memory is the day I turned five. My grandmother on my mom’s side passed away a week before. It was at her funeral, as my mom made her way to the casket, my little hand clasped tightly in her own that I heard it. Clear as day, the voice of my grandma, telling me things no five year old should have to hear.

  “Serenity dear, do not let your mother fall apart. You must not let the demons take control of her.”

  I was five. What the hell did I know about demons and for that matter, how and I supposed to stop my mother from falling apart? I was still learning how to tie my own shoes for crying out loud. Stopping a grown adult from doing something they would most likely do anyway wasn't even on my radar.

  With what I can only explain as childish naivety, I believed she hadn't really passed away. That she'd woken up and spoke the words to me aloud. So, I answered her back.

  “No Nana. You do it.”

  Well let me tell you, the last thing you want to do at a funeral is talk to the dead, or rather, answer them. My mom wasted no time pulling me away from the casket, pulling me completely from the room, all the while checking to make sure no one else heard my outburst.

   “Serenity, what do you think you're doing?”

  “Talking to Nana.” I replied, as if talking to my dead grandmother was something I did naturally every day.

   Oh come on, I was five, what did my mother expect? It wasn't as if at that point I had a whole lot of knowledge with death to fall back on.

  That was my mother’s first glimpse of my gift. I'd like to sit here and tell you that it was her last, but then I'd be lying.

  From that point on it happened more frequently. It grew from being just family members I could speak with, to the most random people. Hospitals were my worst enemy. Between the sick and the dead, it seemed no one there ever knew when to shut up.

  By the time I turned twelve, my mom had been through enough with me. The excuses I gave didn't fly anymore and it was then she brought me to the first doctor. She had to be thinking either I was crazy or that she was losing her mind. Finding a cause became her life's mission.

  We must have gone through six or seven doctors in the first few months alone, all of them telling her I was a perfectly well adjusted young girl with an over active imagination. My mother wasn’t buying it. I can't say I blame her given that I was the one living with the constant barrage of voices in my head. There was no way I could even dream of making something that level of crazy up.

  By the time my thirteenth birthday rolled around, I was officially the patient of a psychiatric center. The mission my mother was on finally paid off, finding the one doctor in our small town of Summerview that believed something really was wrong with me. Maybe she didn’t believe I was crazy, but at the very least, I wasn’t adjusting the way I should be. So her method of handling it was advising my mother to have me committed.

  Summerview Treatment Center became my home for the next two and a half years. As much as you would assume I hated my mom for putting me in a place like that, I actually found myself thankful she did. It was the one place where the voices couldn't get to me.

  In my experience when someone is shown something they don't want to see, or rather what they can’t handle seeing, the first inclination is to turn away from it.  Well in my case it would seem that the minute I walked through the doors of the center, the voices proceeded to do that very thing with me. It’s as if I was too crazy for even them to handle.

  It was the best two and a half years of my life.

  While the real reason I was in the center remained under wraps, it didn't stop the staff from coming up with an adequate diagnosis for what they believed my problem was. The most popular one being that I was schizophrenic. Apparently being able to hear and converse with the dead fell under the umbrella of that particular ailment. I didn't bother fighting the diagnosis. I figured the sooner they labeled me the sooner they'd leave me alone and find someone else to focus their attention on.

  To everybody else I was just the girl who heard voices and it seemed to make my attempts at fitting in go much smoother. It was in one particular group therapy meeting that I met her, the girl that would become my best friend.

  Emma Daniels on the outside seemed like most of the kids I’d gone to school with before I'd been sent away. She seemed happy, well-adjusted and for a while I wondered if she was a figment of my imagination given that I couldn't see what her problem was. We all had our reasons for being there, but with Emma, I really couldn't see it. So of course not knowing ate away at me until I finally gave in and went looking for answers.

  Breaking into the records office I found out she was manic depressive with suicidal tendencies. I have to say, I was shocked, given that she displayed no sign of depression in the times I'd been around her. Not even in group, when you’re encouraged to talk about your illness, did she ever make one mention of it. It was then that I decided to get to know her. If I was being labeled incorrectly, I had to assume that she was too. It just made sense to me that we should stick together. So that’s exactly what we did. For the next two and a half years we were stuck together like glue.

  It hasn’t changed much since.

  The day my mother showed up to get me, about three months after my fifteenth birthday I wasn’t ready to go. Having gone the entire time being more than just the girl who heard voices, I wasn't ready to accept the change. The doctors explained my progress to my mom though and after a few meetings with the staff, I'd been deemed healthy enough to leave. Provided of course that I remained on the medication I’d been taking since the day I’d been diagnosed.

  I followed the rules when I got home, but after a while I gave up on taking the pills, opting instead for going it alone. If I had been able to go almost three years without hearing a voice, maybe now that I was home I really was cured and I'd be able to live a normal life. Or at least as normal a life as a person like me could live.

  The normal didn't last long. By the time I turned sixteen the voices were back and it seems, even more powerful than before. I heard them so frequently I had a hard time telling where they began and I ended. We became one.

  My mother told me once that there hadn't been a moment where she'd been able to get any peace from me when I was younger. I'd followed her around everywhere. This is what I likened the voices to. At least with my mother she could shut the bathroom door to get away from me. With the voices there was no door. It was free reign even when I didn't want it to be.

  Fast forward five years later and I'm about to start my second year of college. I moved out on my own, got a job and have been living apart from my very over protective mother for almost two years. It hasn't been easy, but I learned quickly to contain my responses to the voices and have even managed to create a relatively normal life for myself. At least that’s how it appeared to someone standing on the outside looking in.

  There are only two people that knew the truth and one I didn't speak to anymore. The other is Emma. She remained at the center after I left until her release a year after me. We managed to stay in touch through letters and phone calls once a week. She was never far from my thoughts. I opened up to her in ways that I hadn't been able to do with anyone else and she did much the same with me. We were closer than friends. We were sisters.

  When I went away to college I chose one that was close to her. If I had to go through this life with my so called gift, then I was going to do it with the one person that understood it.

  Our first week back after summer break I heard it for the first time. A new voice, one that in all of the years I’d been hearing them had never come to me before. This voice seemed different than the others.  It’s stronger; more distinct. He was able reach me even when I was sleeping, which is something the other voices have been unable to do. He seemed to want to help me, listen to my thoughts and make sense of the things that up until that point I�
�d been unable to understand.

  A few weeks after he made contact with me I finally broke down and told Emma. As much as I trust her, I always assumed there had to be a limit on her understanding and the last thing I wanted to do was alienate the one person that had been there for me. Turns out, she must have grown a pretty thick skin when it came to my revelations because in telling her, she gave me an alternate way of looking at things.

  “So this guy, he talks to you in your sleep?”

  “Yeah he does—well no,” I backtracked. “Sometimes he sings to me, but most of the time he just talks.”

  “What does his voice sound like?”

  “Ems, what kind of question is that? He sounds like a guy. I don't know how else to describe it.”

  “You tell me you hear a guy in your head and you don't expect me to ask questions like this?”

  She has a point. I suppose to the casual observer this might sound pretty cool, but for me it’s become second nature. I didn't put much thought into the sound of the voice speaking to me, or the fact that I had voices speaking to me at all. It was just something that happened and that I dealt with. Emma wasn't like me though, she found it all fascinating.

  “So what does he sound like? Is his voice all high pitched like Justin Bieber, or is it all low, sexy and mysterious?”

  I knew she wouldn't stop until I told her. She may have issues, but in every other way Emma is exactly like the rest of the world. It all came back to how a person looked, spoke and smelled. Its female hormones at their finest.

  “It's not high pitched at all. In fact it sounds pretty low key. It's melodic, calming even. Whenever he talks to me I feel the most relaxed I've probably ever been. It’s like nothing can get to me. It almost feels dreamlike.

  “Ha! I knew it. You like him.”

  Huh? How did she come to that conclusion?

  “How the hell do you get that from what I just said?” I asked rolling my eyes.

  I knew I wouldn't like her reasoning. I never did when she got this way.

  “Oh Emma, he sounds so dreamlike. His voice is calming. He keeps me relaxed. It's so completely obvious that whoever this voice is, you like him.”

  “You're insane.”

  “No actually I'm depressed. You know this. You aren't denying it though, which is interesting. It looks like my best friend has her first crush on a guy.”

  I don’t often admit this, but sometimes I wish I could be more like Emma and see the world the way she does. How she could make fun of her own illness and shrug it off as if it wasn't a problem when given our past together we both knew it was. I eventually got to see the issues she faced when we roomed together during our stay in the center. It wasn’t pretty.

   Her romantic notions aside though, she did help me take my mind off just who the voice was and what he really wanted with me, at least for a second, which is what I had been hoping for.

  “I do not have a crush on the voice in my head, Ems.” I sighed. “Can we drop it now?”

  “Sure, but I just want to say one more thing first.”

  Rolling my eyes at her again, I motioned for her to say her piece.

  “You said that he comes to you and keeps you calm right? That he has the ability to block out the other voices and that whenever he's around, you feel almost normal right?”

  “Yeah, I guess. What are you getting at?”

  “What if it's not just a random voice? If he has the ability to cut down on the chatter in your head, maybe he's something more specific.”

  “More specific how, Ems? What exactly do you think he is?”

  “Maybe he's your guardian angel.”