Chapter 37 #2
The others, they were left to fade. Grass growing unevenly around the edges, moss creeping in where no one had bothered to clean it away.
I felt it before I fully saw it. Something in me shifted the closer I got, a low, unpleasant pull deep in my stomach that made my steps slow without me meaning them to.
Then my eyes finally caught up with the rest of me, and I found myself standing in front of her grave.
The stone was worn, darker than the others around it where moisture had settled in and never really left.
Moss had claimed most of it, spreading across the surface in uneven patches, softening the edges of the name carved into it.
I had to look properly to read it. There were no flowers, not even the kind that had been left long enough to die, just a stone. I just stood there, looking at it.
There was something there when I looked at it, something heavy and cold that settled into me almost instantly. I couldn’t fully explain it, only that the feeling fit too well. Like I was standing in front of something that belonged beside me in ways I didn’t want to examine too closely.
You would probably try to romanticize it, wouldn’t you, little Ghost?
Call it a bond. Something invisible tying me back to her, something that survived everything that happened after. But no, it didn’t feel like that.
What I felt was uglier than that.
That grave, the way it had been left to grow over, untouched, forgotten, it looked exactly how I felt inside.
Empty but overgrown, abandoned. No one coming back to check if anything was still alive under it.
And standing there, looking at it, I didn’t feel connected to her.
I just felt seen. I stood there and stared at her name until it stopped meaning anything.
Just lines carved into stone, half eaten by moss, barely there and then my head, of course, went straight back to her.
To what she did, to why she did it, because that’s the part no one ever really answers, right?
People always find prettier ways to say things when the truth makes them uncomfortable.
They bury it under diagnoses and careful language until it sounds distant enough to tolerate.
But standing there in front of that grave, with dead leaves gathered around the stone and years of neglect built into every crack of it, I couldn’t make myself fully buy into it anymore.
Because what if she hadn’t been imagining things at all?
What if she had looked at me and seen something nobody else wanted to admit was there?
I dragged my tongue over my teeth, tasting blood that still hadn’t gone away and let that thought sit where it wanted, because it didn’t feel unfamiliar. It felt close. Like something I’d been circling around for years without actually saying it out loud.
What if I was never ruined?
What if there wasn’t some moment where everything went wrong?
What if it had been there from the beginning, and everything that came after only dragged it further out into the open?
Maybe that was the part nobody ever wanted to admit.
The idea that some people aren’t destroyed into becoming something monstrous.
Some people are simply born with something wrong already sitting inside them, waiting for the rest of life to pull it closer to the surface.
Everyone loves the damaged child story because it makes things easier to explain.
Easier to forgive. Easier to package into something tragic instead of something deeply unsettling.
But standing there, staring at that grave, I couldn’t stop thinking about how natural all of this had started feeling to me.
How little resistance there had really been in the end. Maybe none of it created me.
Maybe it just removed enough layers for me to finally see what had been there the entire time.
I let out a breath through my nose, low and uneven, because when I looked back it didn’t feel like a straight line from “good” to “bad”. It felt more like something unfolding.
The silence as a kid, the way I disappeared into my own head like it was the only place that made sense, the way things didn’t land the way they were supposed to in my head, then everything after that.
Bartosz, Krystyna, Zwierek, my father, my mother, all of it.
People would probably say that’s what made me, that’s where it broke, but what if that’s just where it got clearer? Easier to see?
I moved, and pain immediately tore through my side where the knife had gone into me earlier, deep and hot enough to drag me back into my body for a second. A brutal reminder that no matter where my head disappeared to, my body was still standing here bleeding through it.
Could it have been different? If she hadn’t tried to kill me, if I’d stayed, if I’d grown up somewhere normal.
The thought didn’t last long, because no matter how I tried to twist it, it always ended the same way.
Just a different path to the same place.
Like it didn’t actually matter what happened, like this was always where it was going to land, and that sat heavier than anything else.
Not the idea that I was fucked, but that I might’ve been fucked from the start.
I looked at her grave again. At how it had been left, no candles or flowers, just something that had been abandoned and slowly swallowed by time.
I don’t think I was ever gonna admit this, not even to myself, but standing there, I wish I’d met her, just once.
Not even for something big, not for answers or some kind of dramatic confrontation where everything gets laid out and makes sense in the end, just once.
To see how she looked at me, to know if there was even a second where she hesitated, where she almost didn’t do it.
Or, maybe worse, where she didn’t hesitate at all.
I shifted my jaw, feeling it tighten and let out something that almost sounded like a laugh, because then the next thought came right after it, cutting straight through that soft, pathetic part of me.
What kind of goodbye does someone like that even deserve?
Someone who looked at their own child and decided the world would be better off without him.
Someone who set the tone for everything that came after without even sticking around to see it.
I stood there for a second longer, staring down at her name like it might give me an answer.
It didn’t, I mean of course it didn’t. So…
I did what any sane man would do. I did what felt right, given everything.
I let out a slow breath, dragged a hand through my hair and stepped a little closer to the stone.
A fitting goodbye, right? Something honest, something almost proportional.
I huffed under my breath, the corner of my mouth pulling just slightly, something dry and ugly settling in my chest.
Yeah, that felt about right.
So, I pissed on her grave.
Pretty, I know. You’re judging me right now, aren’t you, little Ghost? Or maybe you’re not. Maybe that’s why you’re still here.
That thought lingered a second longer, then it faded.
Because even as I stepped back, even as I adjusted my clothes and looked down at what I’d done, it didn’t feel like enough, not even close.
If anything, it made the emptiness darker.
Like I’d scratched the surface of something and found out there was a lot more underneath it that wasn’t going anywhere.
I looked back at the grave. At her name.
The stone had been left untouched for so many years before I showed up, and somewhere in the middle of staring at it, something in my head started turning.
A thought pushed itself forward hard enough that I couldn’t shove it back down again once it fully formed.
I kept my eyes on the grave, my jaw pulling tighter the longer I stood there.
No. This wasn’t enough.
Not for what she did or for what I became.
Not for the fact that after everything, I still ended up standing here in front of her. If this was going to be a goodbye, it needed to mean something. And suddenly, I knew exactly how I wanted to do it.
I didn’t stay lingering by the grave, if I had, I might’ve lost the nerve, or worse, talked myself out of it in that irritating, reasonable way people pretend is strength, so I turned and walked deeper into the cemetery.
Gravel once again crunching under my shoes, rows of stones passing me by.
Names, dates, little offerings left behind like proof that someone, somewhere, still cared.
Flowers that hadn’t fully died yet, candles melted into warped shapes, photographs tucked into the corners of polished marble.
None of it touched me, I just kept going.
Until the graves thinned out and the path narrowed, until the place started to feel less like something maintained and more like something forgotten, that’s where I saw it.
A small shed pushed out near the edge, half hidden behind overgrown bushes that had started claiming it for themselves.
The wood was weathered, paint peeling in strips.
The door, locked. I stopped in front of it, staring at the chain looped through the handles, the metal dull and worn but still holding.
For a second I just stood there, not thinking much.
Then I glanced down and spotted a rock, heavy and jagged on one side, good enough.
I bent down, picked it up, felt the weight of it settle into my palm, then stepped closer and swung.
A loud crack that echoed a little too much in the quiet as the lock gave, snapped loose, dropping against the door with a dull clatter.
I let the rock fall from my hand and pushed the door open as the smell hit.
Damp wood, rust and old earth. Tools leaned against the walls in no real order, things left behind and forgotten until someone needed them again, and then I saw it. A shovel, perfect.