What was your life like in Hannibal's house by the sea?
ASK MIRIAM Â // ALWAYS ACCEPTING !
              she tries to remember, the smell of the ocean, the the sounds. birds. she remembers the sound of birds. she wasn’t frightened, rarely frightened, after the first three months in his basement she became more like a caged animal. she didn’t understand why, or who was doing this, even though she had seen his face a dozen times, tried to humanize herself to him. make him see she was a person it didn’t work. never worked. four weeks in she stopped trying. the smell of flowers. “I… don’t remember a lot.” Miriam shifts. she tried to keep to a routine, food, sleep, exercise, planning, plotting, counting. anything to keep her mind working. she wouldn’t allow herself to stay still, found herself exhausted more and more, unable to tell what time it was. she slept a lot, woke to the stinging pain of a needle puncturing skin. drowning. she was drowning. Miriam swallows, forces herself to breathe, doesn’t close her eyes, can’t stand the idea of darkness. she looks away. “it was… normal.” word is said in such a way, that it is a paradox in itself. a wavering wilted word pressed to her tongue, tastes like sucking on copper. filthy in her mouth. “it was my normal, my day to day was this… sickening isolation. this endless trapped feeling. it was my normal for a long time. so that’s how it felt.” that is the only way she knows to explain it. it simply… was. talking about it makes her skin crawl, hand moves to scratch at her shoulder, digs short nails into the soft fabric of her jacket. “i expected him to kill me there, and i wasn’t afraid.” never afraid. it’s almost laughable, looking at her now, anxious, eyes flickering against features, she can’t settle, can’t calm herself, can’t control herself. “it was… like becoming someone else.” it was a type of murder ; killing who she was, emptying the shell of her body and putting something else inside.
