Cathy's Story Prologue: It's me again :+)....I'm so glad to see that you are going ahead with the site we talked about. I was caught up in a bunch of other stuff, and never managed to get back to you again. I thank you in advance for the good you are going to do with this, and want you to know that your hard work will be appreciated. I for one will be submitting a story for this as soon as I can get straight in my head how to present it. If there is anything I can do to help please let me know. Maybe some research or something? If I were close enough I would take your kids for awhile, or help with the cooking or laundry or something. LOL..But since I can't do that, just anything you think of that I can....let me know. A great big hug to you! I fear that my head will never be on straight...but I will try to send you my story soon nevertheless. To tell you the truth, I have spent all my life since this happened working hard to try to get along in this world just like I perceive everyone else does. It takes an enormous amount of energy and work just to appear to be "real". I sometimes feel like an alien who must not let anyone know that she doesn't really belong here. Or perhaps one of those spies who go and pretend to belong somewhere. So to put this all down is to undermine what I have been fighting to "project" all this time. No... I can't really say I want to discuss my story..just put it out there so maybe someone else won't feel as alone as I have sometimes over the years. After all, I have survived up til now, and that has been the point, and hopefully will be for someone else. THAT would make it all worthwhile!! Right now I'd better get to bed! Got off work a couple of hours ago, and have to go back at 7:00. Gotta put my bright, perky, "How y'all doin today?" convenience store face back on! Oh Lord...help me.... (ha ha). Hope you have a great day! I am trying, as you can see. I can only write a little at a time, and I hope that's okay, and you can put it all together for me . I know it's a lot to ask, but I really want to do this bad, and I don't know how else I can. I try to keep all this locked away as much as possible, and go on like normal people. So please bear with me if you can. I can't even begin to explain that this is the first time I have even tried to face all of it, and I am so afraid of what "awakening it all" is going to mean. But I promised so if you can hang with me....here we go!! Thank you so much for doing this! ~~//~~ School had only been out for one week. She was 14 years old, a member of the National Honor Society, had been chosen as a teen model for the Sears catalogue for the coming fall season, and was on the second date of her life. Time passed too quickly, and her date had to be at work, leaving his best friend to drive her home. Two blocks from her house, the tie-rod on the old car he was so proud of fell out. It caught in the pavement, and the friend no longer could control the car. It plowed into a telephone pole, after narrowly missing a head-on collision with a station wagon filled with a family. She flew through the windshield, landed back in the seat, then flew through the windshield again. There was blackness, nothingness. The ambulance came, the friend held her hand as they flew to the hospital. The doctor cried as he made her another face. Seventeen hundred and some odd "cross stitches" later, she had a head like a basketball, but her teeth and bones could no longer be seen. This was before CAT scan and all the research about head injury, so everyone breathed a sigh of relief. No, she wouldn't be a model, but she would be okay. You're so lucky to be alive, they said. But the cloud of darkness that had descended on her mind was invisible to all of them. The summer passed, her face healed. It was a mass of red, ropy scars, but she hardly noticed. Her friends made light of it, but she didn't hear them. Inside her head was the same nothingness and blackness she had experienced after the crash. She couldn't stop crying. School started again. The lessons she had loved to learn no longer stayed with her. She heard the sound of the teacher's voice, but she could not comprehend the words. They passed over her, just out of reach. No matter how many hours she spent reading the textbooks, the words just would not sink in. Instead voices began to chatter in her head. She could no longer tell when a real person was talking, or it was the voices. She knew the voices were all her own, but she hadn't known they were there, and she didn't know what to do about them now. She only knew that no one else must know about them. "Possessed by demons" was the phrase that had been used about her mentally ill sister, and she had no doubt that was what had happened to her as well.