Neither long ago nor far away from where you are now, a young woman sits in silence as the rain pours against a window that does not belong to her, the whole of her history contained within her, yet only a small bit of it available to her reckoning. Years before, when this young woman was still small, something broke her. She was neither fragile nor vulnerable, and yet she shattered at her core.
In a last act of self-preservation, she took these shards of her soul and developed them into something she could understand, into something that could live and grow independent of her, something she could not break further, and yet something that could, eventually, become whole again. She never spoke of these new creations, mostly because of the drastic similarities she had noticed to cases of multiple personalities or dissasociation, and this was nothing of the sort. She realized, of course, that she could be entirely wrong, but to her these creatures were not personalities, merely parts of her. They acted as masks for her to survive in the world after she broke into pieces.
A mythology developed over her history, giving a delightful grandiosity to the happenings of her life which were mundane to all but her. The girl had always been quite terrible with issues of memory, and she was able to lock away what little mental record remained of her childhood this way. Everything that she experienced from then on became a part of her personal mythology, remembered and repeated-
especially the mistakes.
When she was older, these masks truly developed into personalities. The girl had created some of them from pieces of herself, her psyche, her thoughts; but created one, and only one, from the deepest part of her, the only part that truly was her- the soul. This Mask was special, and she became almost a second version of the girl. She was named Samantha.
In a last act of self-preservation, she took these shards of her soul and developed them into something she could understand, into something that could live and grow independent of her, something she could not break further, and yet something that could, eventually, become whole again. She never spoke of these new creations, mostly because of the drastic similarities she had noticed to cases of multiple personalities or dissasociation, and this was nothing of the sort. She realized, of course, that she could be entirely wrong, but to her these creatures were not personalities, merely parts of her. They acted as masks for her to survive in the world after she broke into pieces.
A mythology developed over her history, giving a delightful grandiosity to the happenings of her life which were mundane to all but her. The girl had always been quite terrible with issues of memory, and she was able to lock away what little mental record remained of her childhood this way. Everything that she experienced from then on became a part of her personal mythology, remembered and repeated-
especially the mistakes.
When she was older, these masks truly developed into personalities. The girl had created some of them from pieces of herself, her psyche, her thoughts; but created one, and only one, from the deepest part of her, the only part that truly was her- the soul. This Mask was special, and she became almost a second version of the girl. She was named Samantha.
