Sentiments and Schizophrenia: Where Happiness Comes to Die.

The cold was overpowering. It was the sort of cold that had you burrowing under your wrapper, body curled up like a cornered centipede as you sought to summon up heat from the pulsing organs of your body. Yet the cold seeps through, your teeth chatters and goosebumps rise violently along the surface of your skin, so huge they could pass for some terrible plague which was possibly a consequence of an unsavory action you undertook in a previous life. Juliana desperately wanted to sit up, stand up and stamp around. Shake off the cold and get her heart pumping fast enough to release warm blood to several vital parts of her body but she dared not. She would only be calling attention to herself, and in this place of despair, terror and evil, that could cost her her life.

My sister was the most sensitive and emotional of the three of us. She gave too much. Love, money, time, effort, and often to the wrong men, her body. I worried about Lade a lot. I feared that, one day, she would fall into the hands of a man who would recognize her weakness and take advantage of it. So I questioned every new guy she fell in love with weekly, her boss who needed her to work weekends without extra pay and her flatmate who stayed with her but wasn't paying a kobo, yet consuming Lade's meat, milk and space. My sister was a gentle soul and i needed to protect her so i told them off, stood up for her, did the things she was too shy to do and generally watched her back.