Chapter 39 #2
The first time they tried questioning me, I heard the voices before I understood the words.
Everything reached me warped somehow, like my brain kept losing parts of the conversation before it could fully put it together.
Certain things stood out where the rest drifted in and out around me.
I sat there staring past them, my body in the room long before the rest of me managed to catch up.
My name was in there. A question maybe. Another one right after.
I didn’t answer, but not because I chose not to, more because there was nothing there to answer with.
My mouth stayed shut, my jaw locked in a way I didn’t remember deciding.
The longer I sat there, the further everything slipped.
I had done this before, as a kid, disappeared like that.
Curled so far into myself that the rest of the world stopped feeling real. Back then, it had been controlled.
A place I went to on purpose when things got too loud, too much. I chose it, built it, stayed there until I was ready to come back. This? This wasn’t that.
This felt like falling through something that didn’t have a bottom.
They tried again later. Questions came faster this time, firmer.
Someone leaning in, trying to get a reaction out of me, trying to pull me back up to the surface like I was something they could drag out if they just pushed hard enough.
I felt it, that pressure but nothing happened.
My body stayed where it was, but my head was somewhere else.
It wasn’t quiet inside, that’s the fucked part, because you’d think it would be, right?
You’d think shutting down like that would mean silence, but it was crowded.
Too many thoughts tearing through my head at once, all of them half-formed and impossible to pin down, but still violent enough to leave damage behind anyway.
Violence, the grave, his face in the trees, my hands on his throat, the sound of the coffin breaking, over and over but never in order.
And underneath all of it, something that didn’t care about anything, about any of it.
Something that only cared about one thing– finish it.
Because if there’s only one thing I know about myself, I don’t step into something halfway. I don’t start something unless I intend to take it all the way through. Not a fight, a war. And I don’t lose those, not even to myself.
That thought was the only one that sat there, steady, while everything else fractured around it until something else followed, a need. Connection, even just the idea of it. And it hit me harder than anything else had in that moment, because what the fuck could I even offer someone?
What is there to give when all I’ve ever had in me is silence?
The kind that eats everything before it gets out, the kind that makes people lean in at first, then pull away when they realize there’s nothing there for them.
Maybe that’s why letting anyone close has always felt wrong in a way I could never fully explain.
It’s never just the fear of what someone can do to you once they know where to cut.
It’s the fear of being seen clearly for a second and watching the look in their eyes change afterward.
Watching someone realize there’s something underneath you that doesn’t heal correctly.
Something angry. Something grieving so deeply it eventually stopped knowing the difference between love and ruin.
I think people mistake rage for cruelty too often.
Most rage is grief that lost its place to go.
Grief left trapped inside the body long enough that it starts rotting into something else.
And maybe that’s the cruelest part of me.
My body still expects abandonment everywhere I go, still waits for people to leave the second they touch the worst parts of me, while something deeper inside me keeps loving with an intensity that borders on self-destruction.
So maybe that’s the real question underneath all of it.
Not whether I’m lovable when I’m easy. But whether there is still something in me worth loving once the agony is visible too?
I fucking felt it, that split, the one I’d been ignoring.
Because there were two versions of me sitting there.
The one who had done it, every part of it.
The grave, the violence, the murders, the lack of hesitation, the way something in me liked it.
Then another part, the part watching it all unfold.
Sickened by it. Aware enough to know what I’d done, aware enough to see it clearly and they didn’t fit together.
So which one was real?
And if both of them were me, did one get to forgive the other?
Or was that just another lie people tell themselves so they can sleep?
My hands twitched in my lap, a small movement, but it was the first thing my body had done in a while that felt like it came from me.
Another thought appeared, more clear than the others.
I was done bleeding for nothing. Done tearing myself open for things that didn’t deserve it.
If I was going to break, if I was going to burn through myself like that, it had to be for something that mattered.
Something worth the damage, otherwise what the fuck was the point?
Because the worst part, that no one ever talks about, is how close it feels.
Self-destruction. It’s intimate. It sits right against your skin, moves with you, breathes with you, knows exactly where to press to make it hurt in the right way, that’s what makes it dangerous.
My body has survived things that should have destroyed me.
Hands that treated me like something disposable.
People who cut into me emotionally, physically, psychologically, until fear stopped feeling temporary and started feeling permanent.
There are parts of me that still react like the danger never ended, parts wired so tightly around survival that even tenderness can feel unfamiliar at first. But I am exhausted from carrying fear like it belongs to other people more than it belongs to me.
Exhausted from shrinking myself to make others comfortable with what happened to me.
My body has already paid for enough.
It has bled enough.
Endured enough.
And after everything it survived, I think it deserves something gentler now.
Something honest. Hands that do not harm.
A room where my nervous system is finally allowed to unclench for the first time in years.
I do not owe the world my fear anymore just because other people worked so hard to put it there.