I woke up just as the ghostly hands gripped my throat. My torso rocked straight up in bed as my lungs tried to get enough oxygen in them. Eventually I realized there were no hands, I was not backed into a corner; I was safe and sound in my own bed.
But the tendrils of my nightmare were still clinging to my mind like sick, black, twisting vines. My mouth felt like I had swallowed a handful of sawdust, so I pushed myself up off my worn mattress and went to get a drink of water.
Instead of walking into my bathroom, however, I smacked my head against a cold metal bar.
“What the hell?” I muttered sleepily as I rubbed the small bump on my forehead. My other hand reached out in front of me and felt the same bar again. I moved my hand slightly to the right and felt another cold bar. Then another, and another.
My stomach dropped to my feet as white-hot panic bubbled up to my throat and eyes. The only sound I could hear was my breath inhaling and exhaling rapidly as I felt around the entire perimeter of my bed. I was completely enclosed in a box made of metal bars, like a cage. I tried squeezing through one of the gaps, but the spaces between were too small, even for my tiny frame. I tried kicking them down, but the only thing I accomplished was a bruised foot and a metallic ringing that filled my room. There was no way out.
“Help!” I screamed. My parents would know what to do; they would get me out of here. “Help, Mom! Dad! Please!” I yelled again and again, but as the seconds stretched into minutes, I realized there was no one coming to my rescue.
My legs finally gave out beneath me and I sank to the floor. Here things were steady, here things didn’t feel like everything was tipping out of balance and that things would soon make sense. The hot tears started to flow down my cheeks and left salty streams in their wake. I didn’t even bother to brush them away, like I would have any other time. Sometimes you needed to feel like a child to become an adult again.
“Feeling sorry for ourselves, are we?” a low, croaky voice said behind me. I jumped up and spun around to see the silhouette of a person, a woman, maybe, standing there.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded in a shaky voice.
“Why, I’m you,” she said in a voice I barely recognized as my own. Some light source from above shown down and illuminated her petite frame, her dark auburn hair, her pale white skin splashed with tan freckles, and her piercing blue eyes. She wasn’t lying; she looked exactly like the person I saw in the mirror everyday. But she wasn’t me, she was darker, somehow, like everything that existed annoyed her.
   Shock waves rolled through my body as I tried to comprehend who was standing in front of me. There was no way she could be me; I was me, and I felt like me.
“You’re not real,” I stammered eventually. My legs hit the chilly wood of my off-white bed behind me. “This-this is not real. I’m just dreaming.”
“Weeeell,” the doppelganger drawled. “Yes, and no. You are not conscious, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
Yet another thing to wrap my head around, great. “So what exactly is this, then?” I demanded, annoyed.
She paused, pondering her answer. “Think of it as a test,” she said with a sly smile.
I waited for her to on, but she said nothing. She just kept staring at me with that identical face that should move when I do, but it doesn’t.
I turn away to my bed, disgusted and afraid of what stood before me. Now that there was some light illuminating my room I saw all of my things were still here. My trophies from soccer, all my souvenirs from the places I’ve been, a world map hanging over my bed dotted with push-pins of where I still wanted to go. My eyes rested on some pictures of me and my friends, my family, my boyfriend. We were all smiling stupid, fake smiles that were only there because that’s what you did when you posed for a picture; you pretended to be happy.
I quickly moved my eyes away and found my current journal lying on the floor next to my bed, but it was within the cage surrounding me. The rest of my journals and books were scattered around my room in heaps on the floor. I moved to pick up the well worn, earth brown journal to write in it everything I was currently feeling and everything that was happening. It was really the only way for me to cope with reality; every journal I had was filled with stupid scenarios of what I had wanted to say in real life and how I wish things would have ended. But I never have the guts to say what I want, so I write it down. It was just easier. Cleaner, even. There were no consequences about writing something no one would ever read.
But when I opened the tattered journal, alter-ego Me just shook her head and clucked her tongue in her mouth. “Classic, classic, Amy,” she drawled.
I looked up from my spot on the bed and saw she was smiling, but not a friendly, maternal smile. It was like she knew something I didn’t.
“...always writing down a different reality instead of living one.”
I stared at her, but she just laughed. “Why do you write, exactly, huh? Because you’re too much of a coward to say what you actually want to? Because you want to escape a reality and create a perfect one to live in instead? Hate to break it to you, but it doesn’t work that way,” she said as she glared at me under her curtain of bangs.
To be perfectly honest, she was starting to piss me off. Everything about this was really starting to piss me off. I just wanted to sleep, was that so much to ask for?
“So what?” I demanded. “Everyone has their own way of coping. This is mine.”
“This isn’t coping, Amy,” she snapped. “It’s a cop-out.”
“How?” I asked. “How is writing down how I feel in a journal a cop-out? Last I checked no one ever read this or cared what I wrote in it because it’s none of their damn business.”
“It’s a cop-out because you don’t want to tell them anything,” she finalized.
Her words stopped me cold for a minute. I knew she was right, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of that.
“That’s not true,” I lied, but she saw right through it.
“Oh, bullshit,” she shot back. “Every time someone asks you ‘how are you?’ you lie and say ‘I’m fine, how are you?’ because the absolute last thing you want is anyone knowing the truth.”
I said nothing because she was right. I lied to my friends, my family, Adam even… it was just easier.
“Now you think it’s because you don’t want to bother them, to have anyone worry over you,” she went on. I looked up at her from my thinking spot on the floor and felt the anger fuming up inside of me. She was crossing a line. “You just want to deal with your own s*** because you are too lazy to articulate what the hell is wrong with you in the first place!”
“Okay, fine!” I snap. “I don’t want people to know that I feel dead inside half the time because no one wants to hear that! And if I did tell them, they would look at me like I was a freak, or maybe not even care. So it’s easier to stay silent and push people away because that way no one will worry or get hurt, or end up hurting me. It’s just safer for everyone!”
“Is it?” she demanded as she walked over and stood with her face pressed against the bars. “Is being trapped inside your own mind really better for you, or for anyone? Because I can guarantee you it isn’t.”
“How?” I demand.
“You are seriously telling me that everytime you lie to Adam, you don’t see the hurt there? You don’t see that he knows you’re lying? Because he looks right past you and sees this place, Amy. With you in it.”
“He doesn’t need to know,” I say softly. My heart breaks a bit at the thought of my own plan backfiring on him, but he can’t know.
“Why not?” she asks forcefully.
“Because he will just leave!” I say. “He won’t care, or he will just think I’m too much of a bother and leave because that’s what people do.”
“Seriously? You’ve been with this guy for three years and you still think he’s going to leave?”
“It doesn’t matter how many years I’ve been with him!” I scream as the tears start to build behind my eyes again, hot and stinging as they close off my throat. “There will always be that voice in the back of my head that says ‘he’ll leave, stay quiet’ because it’s all I’ve done my entire life! It’s- it’s just safe, and comfortable,” I say eventually, defeated.
My clone is just staring at me with those ice-blue eyes that look as if they could freeze me cold. Her pale face was deathly still, like she was a robot. She was all quiet fury and I was standing directly in her line of fire.
Slowly, like she was making every movement count, she placed her hands on the bars and gripped them tight. She leaned her head in through the gap in the bars, like a snake who was slithering through a tight spot.
“Life isn’t safe,” she hissed. Her jaw held all her anger and tension, so much so that it looked as if she could bite through the bars herself. “Life isn’t about pleasing others or living in a journal because that’s not reality. Reality is the good and the bad, the people you meet and the choices you make, and it's the only reality you will ever get. So if you want to spend your entire life in a cage, trapped, then be my guest. Good luck finding your way out of here.”
My clone let go of the bars and turned to the bedroom door to leave me in here to rot. She was just about to close the door when I realized she wasn’t bluffing.
“Hey!” I yelled. She turned around. “You can’t just leave me in here.”
She laughed, high and twinkling with mockery. “Sweety, I couldn’t get you out of here even if I wanted to. That’s for you to figure out.”
And with that she turned and closed the door.
The echo of wood on wood reverberated throughout my room like a death knell. My body slumped against the cold bar as I realized just exactly how screwed I was. How the hell was I supposed to get out of an enclosed metal cage on my own?
I looked over at my clock and read it was 2:30 in the morning. My phone, which should have been right next to it, was no where to be found, so there was no way to even call someone for help. My parents were nowhere to be found either.
Seeing the situation as hopeless, I flopped down on my bed and stared at the ceiling through those maddening metal bars and tried to think my way out. Nothing happened.
Exasperated, I threw my pillow over my face to get those bars out of my sight. Instead, I saw all the looks I would get from my friends and family when I lied to them. Some believed me, which always left me with a sense of disappointment and I had no idea why. Others, such as Adam, always saw through it. He saw through the facade and saw this damn cage every single time. It was surprising he hasn’t left me yet; day in and day out he has had to put up with my bullshit and never once pushed me, never once even mentioned leaving me for someone who didn’t have emotional baggage. It was incredible to be perfectly honest…
Maybe I should try opening up more. It would be the right thing to do. They cared about me and I just threw it back in their faces. They all deserved so much better...

Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!
I woke up with a start and slammed my alarm clock off. I groggily sat up in bed and tried to rub the sleep out of my eyes, but with little success. My legs swung down off my bed and stepped on the worn journal I was writing in last night. I leaned down to pick it up and saw the words ‘caged’ and ‘trapped’ in it again. Suddenly the images of me screaming, trapped in a cage around my bed, popped into my head. The journal fell from my hands as I tried to compose myself.
“Weird,” I whispered to myself. Shaking the strange image out of my head, I picked up the journal and put in on my bed. The clock on my nightstand read 6:30. If I dilly-dallied any longer I was going to be late for school, and sure enough, my mom was downstairs yelling at me to get up. So I walked into my bathroom and fell into the same monotonous routine.