I have no memory. All I know is the inside of this room; this eight foot wide, ten foot long room. I have a window, but all I can see is another part of the hospital and the sky. I don't know where I am, who my family is... I don't even know my name. I guess I don't really need one, since I've been alone for as long as I can remember.

But then there is that woman. The unpleasant one, who lifted a flap on the door and leered at me for a solid minute. I don't know who she is, but I hope I'm not supposed to know her. She makes my skin crawl and my heart thump painfully hard. Probably from terror. Because that's really the only stark emotion I know.

I have dreams sometimes, dreams about a fairytale. Beauty and the Beast, I think. But then I wonder where I got that idea because as far as I can recall I've never picked up a book in my life. But I have no memory to go off of. So I tell myself it is Beauty and the Beast. A girl forced into a monster's castle, never to see her family again. And somehow she falls in love, and the Beast falls in love back. I don't know how the story ends, my dreams won't tell me.

But those dreams begin to awaken something else inside me besides terror. At first I don't have a name for it; I just hold the warm bubbly feeling to myself and don't let anyone see. Because somehow these people who keep me here 'for my own good' manage to take everything lovely away from me. I hold the feeling and let it grow.

And then a word, a name for the feeling slowly forms in my mind.

Hope.