When is it difficult to know when you've done wrong?

GUILT


Kate sat in the backseat of her attorney’s car as they were driving away from the meeting. The stall tactics had worked again against her clueless sister and she should have been ecstatic.

But there was a new pain in her gut and it wasn’t the by now familiar feel of the demon she’d invited in to masticate on her soul. This was new. She looked out the window trying to distract her self but she didn’t see the cars passing them or the landscape whizzing past.

What she saw was her parent’s faces. This was blatantly impossible, she knew that they were safely dead -- weren’t they? But there they were vividly alive on the glass, snarling in anger, their lips moving furiously. Even though she couldn’t hear their words, she whispered to them, “I’m getting her, mom. Dad I’m winning. I’ve learned my lessons well, aren’t you proud of me?”

Suddenly she could hear their voices so loud in her mind that they overrode the triumphant crowing of her attorney.

“You are a bad girl, and you will be punished. This isn’t what we wanted and you know that!” They shouted on and on and on and she closed her eyes but couldn’t stop the voices. She didn’t hear her daughter ask what was wrong or feel the car pull off to the side of the road.

Because after all her years of carefully constructing one new persona after another to avoid the edge of madness; today her parents voices had finally tipped her over into the abyss. And the blankness in her eyes and the froth on her lips came not from the demon but from years of built up guilt.

Too bad she couldn’t tell anyone.