• She wished her heartbeat was a simple as the heavy beats of the thick club music flowing from the overly large, retro silver and black Sony headphones that hung around her slender, lily-white neck, that it was just an unimportant beat. Messy, naturally wavy red- brown hair that had been hastily run through with a straight iron a few days before was thrown up into a loose ponytail, bangs having been parted to the side and tucked tentatively behind the shell of her right ear, a place they didn’t like to stay for very long, sometimes falling to frame an innocent, thin face, hollowed out by stress and sleeplessness. A pair of once-sparkling dark mahogany caramel eyes were rimmed with dark circles and her mother’s borrowed brown eye shadow. She looked paler than normal and felt rather sick to her stomach, but refused to let this be known. Her illness was only made more apparent in her attempts to hide it, though it was no deadly disease or common illness. Not an STD or a cold. Just an illness of the mind. Not insanity, nor schizophrenia. It was nothing curable.
    The poor girl felt like her entire world had just fallen apart. Her stomach was about to collapse in on itself, but she wasn’t hungry. Her throat was dry and crying for water, but she wasn’t thirsty. Her head ached, and no amount of aspirin would make it okay. Her heart was thudding against her ribcage, crying to get free, but she ignored it. She felt nauseated, but she didn’t reach for an Alka Seltzer or Pepto Bismol. She turned up her music and just sat on her bed, gazing upward distractedly at a white ceiling. Her eyes hurt, but she didn’t blink. She just didn’t move. Her hands were holding a small doll in Latin American dress, frayed pink, white, and green satin ribbons wound into its black yarn pigtail braids. The velvet face stickers had been pulled off the soft doll’s face long ago, and the lace that had once trimmed the edge of her purple, blue, green, and pink yarn hand-made in Mexico dress was wrapped around her neck in the form of a stylish scarf. The girl broke her staring war with the ceiling to look at her doll. She raised the doll up to look into its non-existent eyes. She sighed heavily and spoke for the first time in several hours.
    “Little Dolly, when do you think this madness with end? When will they just let Daddy be? When can he come home and just be Daddy again, not just a name on a prescription slip?” The girl’s bloodshot eyes were rimmed with tears and her cheeks turned a blotchy red as she began to cry and continued to speak to the little doll. “When can they just let Daddy come home?!” She curled up into a defenseless, fetal ball on top of her flower-patterned quilt, tears falling freely. “I want Daddy back, Little Dolly.” She whimpered through sobs. She was supposed to be the strong one while her father was gone, so that she could take care of her younger brother and mother and keep them from going insane. But the poor girl’s little heart was just broken into fifty thousand pieces.
    They had put her father in the asylum again. His medications had been wrong again.
    This was the second time they had taken him away from his family to correct his medications.
    His daughter, the young girl now crying her eyes out, took it the hardest the second time around.
    “I love you Daddy.” She whispered, slipping into a dark, cold, empty, dreamless state of sleep. The music still pulsated from her headphones.