Writing, Help me Please....To the Abyss and Back....need Critique

Chapter 1, Prologue It was one of those crisp evenings, and on nights like this, I could remember how it all started. Nights like these were filled with the spring air, the same air that I remembered smelling when I had it all one day, and the next, I lost it all. It had began abruptly, without warning, I had gone from a happy college kid, to someone who feared fear itself. What made it all the more disturbing was the lack of sleep. In one instance, I was tired, but could not sleep, then I would lay there in my dorm room bunk bed and stare out the window at the beautiful Gettysburg College campus and listen to the chirping of birds, which normally was a happy sound. The sound of these birds, however, took on a demonic and meaningful shrill chirp. After a few hours of laying there, eyelids clicking, trying desperately to sleep with no sign of the sweet relief coming, I climb out of bed and check the time while I reach for the telephone by the TV set. The clock read 6:45 am. As if moving through an ethereal cloud of reality mixed with increasingly slow moving and gloomy perception, I sank deeper with every passing minute. It was finals week as I neared the middle of my college career, end of my sophomore year. Just three more exams to take, I thought. But at that point I was in trouble. Not the kind of trouble you get into with the law or with a girl you date, no, I was in over my head, and it would be a long way out of a deep, dark hole. I was going to call my mom, but even as I dialed the numbers, I couldn't remember what her number was and the digits on the keypad looked all mixed up in a jumble of mathematics that I couldn't figure out. "Ok, you can do this," I thought to myself. I reminded myself that anyone that had not had a wink of sleep in 72 hours would probably be in similar shape. Finally, after several attempts of punching in random strings of phone numbers, the phone was ringing, I was calling for help. The voice on the other side of the cheap dorm room phone was a comforting one, although at this point, the most comfort that I was in for was the way out my mother was offering. "I'm leaving in a few minutes, do you need anything?" She would say, "I just need to grab a few things and then I'll be there baby, don't worry." My mom, I thought, was my savior and my confidant, and although she could not understand the strings of psychotic thoughts I was stuck with, she could help me from the outside. "Are you feeling all right?" my room mate would ask me. "No, not really," I would respond as the very fabric of time would be in my perceptions, intermittently speeding up and then back to a slow crawl. Every outside stimuli, like someone calling to their friend from far away or a car honking it's horn, had some insidious purpose for doing so and it all fit together. It fit together so well, I remember thinking, that the events happening all around me were part of a larger purpose. My roommate was working for the CIA, I thought, and he can read my thoughts. Even the people on the radio and TV mediums knew what I was thinking. It wasn't until later that I learned that this was a form of projecting upon others. In fact, they were all just cogs in a grand master paranoid delusion that made up conspiracy theories and confirmed their validity with every passing moment. My friends, on the outside of the dungeon of my mind, just got to enjoy life, free of the burden of schizophrenia and its poison to my thoughts. For me, well, I was just stuck in a racing auto bon of thoughts with no slowing down in sight. It wasn't until my mom arrived and picked me up that I felt my first pang of relief, if just for a moment. The next four hours were a blur, until I finally spotted a burgundy 1989 Buick Park Ave pulled up and my mom jumped out. Chapter 2 Carol Lynn Dibley On the way home to Chatham, NJ, I felt my first worried thought for my oldest son. Driving in the focused desperation of my first experience with this young man, who had so suddenly needed help. My son had been so independent up until this point. I didn't care one bit about that, this was the maternal instinct in me who would do anything and be strong in the face of whatever came the way of my son. It didn't matter, I was probably just as frightened as my blond- haired-hunk-of-a-son who was currently rocking back and forth like someone who is suffering withdrawal from horrible street drugs. With the seat in the Buick Park Avenue back, it looked like Shea was riding on a burgundy couch with tremendous leg and head room and support. "Focus on the road, Carol Lynn," I was hardly paying attention to the pavement moving beneath and behind us on Route 81. As we headed back towards the New Jersey boarder, I had so many unanswered questions, so many concerns, many of which I wouldn't get the answers to for a few years to come. My mind was like a pendulum, swing between questions, worried rushed thoughts, and contradictions to each. We will get to the bottom of this, I knew confidently. But then and again, a sinking feeling would pull my confidence away, and then it would roll back up over me like a warm wave pulling and pushing as would the tides of the ocean. On the one hand, I felt relieved that my son had reached out when he did for help. It was almost like he had a clairvoyance on the phone, and a clarity of mind to match. And on the ride home so far, for the hour or so that he was reclining next to me, Shea was passing through stages of lucidity, anxiety, moving his hand nervously over his face and down his sides as if to wash out the demons that must have been haunting him. Suddenly, an image flashed through my mind of fifteen or so years ago watching him do a similar motion, then it fleeted, and it was gone. Was I going crazy? I had to keep it together for Shea and for the rest of the family. After all, Colin wouldn't understand this sudden turn of events, he just wasn't deep enough. As we drew closer every mile to home, I realized what laid ahead of me. Calling doctors, finding treatment, offering support, all the while wondering whether my barely 20 year old son would make it through all of this. However horrid this was going to be for him, though, I had a feeling that it was going to also be extremely difficult for the family and for me, especially. Chapter 3 Alana Carolyn Dibley May 5th, 1999 Tomorrow was my brother’s 20th birthday, but it wasn’t the same this year. Shea had come back from college after our mother raced out of the house in a panic to get him from college, and since he had been home, he had been in bed 20 hours per day, and mom had been on the phone most of the time trying to get some answers. No, this year was different. After all, it would only be a short week until my sweet sixteen and I had issues of my own with school, friends and popularity struggles. A nagging feeling of dread still tugged at me, though, leaving me wondering whether college was all it was cracked up to be and whether in a few short years, my brother Shea’s fate would also be my own. The house was mostly quiet and the Dibley family had hit a new nerve, with all on edge and all worried about my oldest brother. Troy, being only 14 months older than I, seemed to have a quiet detachment from all of this, while showing compassion and caring in his own calm convicting way. Just then, a dark late spring cloud was forming that rolled over the hill to make it's descent on our English Tutor and those who inhabited it. Shea Dibley Mid May 1999 Chatham, NJ It was something of a sleep, but I would have called it more of a fitful thing. Sometimes 20 hours a day I would lay in that freaking bed. I would wake, or be woken to satisfy my hunger or to relieve myself, and be so intensely tired that I had no choice to give in to the horrible sleep that consumed me once more. Eyelids clicking and fighting a boxing match in slumber, I was reduced to the most primal of states that are seldom seen at my age of 20 years. No, in fact, it was generally reserved for those in the most early and last stages of life. When I was awake, covers thrown off in the 85 degree arid heat, it was a different thing that chained my very being up to make me the prisoner in my mind that I had so suddenly become. After all, the highest ranks of foreign and domestic governments were now conspiring against me in a grand master delusion that bashed at my psyche. Falling fast, deep within my mind, I knew that I needed more help than my family could provide, if only temporarily. Although a long and uphill gravel road with perils along each turn lay in store for me, not once did I give into the very darkest daemon, the one that told me, in not so many words, that life was no longer worth living. What a strange turn of events this was, as the earth split underneath my feet to reveal the dark chasm below. I was falling then, deeper into the abyss that I had to swim free of for many long years. The pressure of the water around me almost completely crushed me from all angles. Unable to capitulate on the length of time I would be down in the dark divide in the earth's crust, I simply embraced the darkness, as the solar eclipse of my mind began. ---------