0243. Awake
THE WEIGHT OF THE body in my arms is what drags me around to cognizance, eventually.
Again I know right away who it isn’t, which feels like a strange, cruel mercy.
I lower my head to smell familiar traces on her mouth, that sinister sweetness.
The cuts on her arms and torso are inelegant, vicious.
Like the person with the knife got angry, started hacking partway through the bone.
“What went wrong this time?” I murmur aloud.
More like what went right, you snort derisively in reply. You’re licking an ice cream cone.
I’m standing outside the greenhouse again. What is it about this place? Ova never liked me going here, she worried I’d fall. The guardrail is weak and almost certainly inadequate.
Once again, I try not to ask myself: Am I capable of carnage?
Troubling not to take comfort in an answer.
Sometimes I feel I know things absolutely.
For example, something is very wrong with me.
I was born to this world as a punishment.
It would be better if I hadn’t been. I do not take life lightly, outside of my own.
Other times, things feel opaque. There is a tear in the space between conviction and experience. I have no desire for torment, and yet clearly, I have proven myself capable of violence many times, in many ways.
What I almost always lack is a reason. All these crimes of passion without any requisite flame must mean true cruelty, abomination.
The monster, Anya calls it, and she means you. But it must be me, too, in the end.