Not just the pain that come from a small bruise, or from one's dress pressing too tightly around the waist. The pain that completely takes over, draining you of happy thoughts, and the will to be alive.
This wasn't how it was supposed to happen.
I wanted to move forward with my life, being with the person I cared for. My mother took it all away from me, and not in the way a mother should have done.
She didn't treat me like a daughter at all. To her, I was a pet, an animal, something you'd see in a zoo, to be put on display, just to keep her satisfied. And this was my reward.
Pain. Humiliation. The foul stench of the room crawling down my throat and into my lungs. The manacles chafed my naked legs. The things with six legs explored my body, climbing around my neck, breasts, hair, ears. They tried to eat me more than once - or at least, I think they did.
Sometimes I allowed them.
Mother threw a fish at me once. I ignored her, not wishing to look at the slimy thing she'd deposited in front of me. She threw many things at me - fish, meat, vegetables, only when she'd run out of bread. She would shower my face with water, so it soaked my cheeks but I could barely drink it. The little things she threw by my bed turned into crust, hardening into rock and forming a barrier around me. I threw up several times. That hardened too.
Sometimes I'd shout Mother's name, not out of love, or desperation for her company, but for mercy. It changed from shouts of mercy to shouts of anger.
"Kill me!" I'd scream. "Mother, just kill me!"
The door would stay locked tight, and she wouldn't hear me.
The terrifying part is that I meant what I said. Instead of enduring this pain - the pain I was never supposed to feel - I wanted it to be over.
The walls of the tiny cell closed in, draining all air from my chest. My naked body grew stale with dirt, and the same dirt clogged my throat. Hair was just a sticky chunk against my scalp.
I thought she would give up on me eventually. After all, I was her daughter. The bond between a mother and her child was supposedly the strongest of all. She would find it in her heart to set me free. If I could only endure the pain for a little longer...
But I would have to wait twenty more years for the door to finally open.
*
Blanche Monnier, a 25-year-old French socialite, was imprisoned by her mother in a room for 25 years after she disapproved of her daughter's choice of husband. She spent those years living in her own excrement, chained naked to a bed, with little food and water. She was only freed when an anonymous letter tipped off the Attorney General, and her mother was arrested.
Blanche spent the final years of her life in a sanatorium, dying in 1913.
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