Chapter 42
Six months had passed.
I only know that because someone told me.
Could’ve been less. Could’ve been more. Time inside that place stopped feeling connected to anything real after a while.
The lights turned on. The lights turned off.
Food got shoved through the slot in the door.
Voices came and went. Sometimes people touched me before speaking to make sure I was paying attention.
Sometimes they repeated my name enough times that it stopped sounding like mine.
After enough time in a place like that, your body stops waiting for permission from the rest of you.
It wakes up. Eats when food appears. Lies down when the lights go out.
Survives automatically while your head drifts farther and farther away from it.
I think that realization did something to me.
The understanding that a human being can get used to almost anything if you trap them with it long enough.
Even this. Even becoming something that sits in silence for hours staring at concrete walls without feeling the need to move.
One hour doesn’t feel like anything, then suddenly a week is gone and you don’t remember a single moment of it, just the feeling of sitting there, breathing, existing in a space that doesn’t want you.
They kept me in isolation.
A small room, concrete on every side, the kind that held onto cold even when it shouldn’t, like the walls themselves had memory, like they remembered everyone who had been locked inside them before me and decided to keep a piece of it.
There was a narrow bed bolted into the floor, a thin mattress that never really softened no matter how long I lay on it, a metal toilet in the corner and a small slit of a window too high up to look out of unless I stood on the edge of the bed and strained my neck just to catch a piece of sky.
I didn’t do that often, but the sky didn’t feel like it belonged to me anymore.
Most days, the only movement came when they opened the door to take me out to the yard.
One hour, same time, every day. A routine so predictable it almost felt cruel, like they were reminding me that even my freedom was scheduled, handed out in controlled doses.
They walked me there in silence, always the same hallway, the same sound of boots against the floor, the same echo bouncing off the walls like it had nowhere else to go.
Some of them looked at me the way you’d look at something you didn’t quite trust to stay still, something that might bite if you got too close.
Others didn’t look at me at all, like I wasn’t even worth the effort.
They made me see the psychologist again, a few times, scattered across those months like it was supposed to change anything. Like if they placed me in a room often enough with someone trained to understand broken things, something inside me would eventually crack open in the right way.
Idiots.
I sat across from him in room after room that all looked exactly the same, the same metal chair under me, the same table separating us while he kept talking.
His voice always carried that careful tone people use when they think one wrong word might make someone shut down completely, but I still gave him nothing back.
You remember I told you, little Ghost, how I used to disappear when I was a kid?
Slip inward, build something inside, something better than the world I had been put in.
A place where things made sense. Where I could breathe without waiting for something to hit me, or take something from me, or twist me into something I didn’t want to be.
This wasn’t that anymore. Whatever part of me used to reach for comfort had already burned out a long time ago.
What was left felt colder and meaner than that.
It wasn’t a refuge, it wasn’t even a place.
It was more like being locked in a room with everything I had ever tried not to look at and having the door sealed behind me so I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there.
Violence didn’t come and go, it stayed. It sat in my chest, in my throat, in the back of my fucking skull, constant and humming, turning over the same thoughts again and again until they stopped feeling like thoughts and started feeling like something darker.
You know what they do when something is made wrong?
They pretend it wasn’t made at all. They call it a mistake, a defect, but I was and still am what they built. Every hand that touched me, every voice that shaped me, every silence that swallowed me whole, this was the result. Filth doesn’t create something clean, it never has and it never will.
And the grief, God, the grief didn’t leave.
There’s a special kind of pain that doesn’t ask to be released, a kind that doesn’t want out, it wants to stay and after a while, you stop trying to remove it.
Instead, you start feeding it. The psychologist would sit there, watching me, waiting, trying to find some entry point, some crack in the silence he could slip through and I could see it in his face sometimes.
That moment where he realized he wasn’t talking to someone who wanted to be understood.
I didn’t want help, actually, I didn’t want anything.
That’s worse, I think. Because when you stop wanting, when even survival stops feeling urgent, something changes.
Something fundamental. You stop being a person moving toward something and become static. Stuck, rotting in place.
Madness isn’t always loud, you know, sometimes it’s just the absence of anything else.
Sometimes it’s what happens when fear doesn’t have anywhere to go, when grief doesn’t have an endpoint, when everything that should have broken you doesn’t, stays instead warping everything it touches.
And at some point, you stop asking whether you’re becoming something worse and instead start asking whether you should.
If they turn you into a disaster, why wouldn’t you answer in kind?
Why wouldn’t you take everything they poured into you and give it back tenfold?
Tell me, little Ghost, is it better to become the thing that destroys, or the thing that gets eaten alive piece by piece without ever making a sound?
I used to think there was a difference, but that stopped quickly.
You want to kill something, you have to name it first. You have to look at it without flinching, without dressing it up.
That’s the part that no one tells you. They act disgusted by what runs through your veins, like it’s something unnatural, something they could never touch, but they watch.
They always watch. They lean in when you start to bleed, study it, they whisper about it, they pass it around like it’s something fascinating.
You think they don’t want it?
They do, they just don't want to admit it. And you, you sit there, little Ghost, on the other side of all of this, listening to me, letting me spill everything out in a way I never did back then and you can leave whenever you want. That’s the difference between you and me.
You can close this, walk away, try to forget it.
I don’t get that. I don’t get to step outside of myself, I don’t get distance, I don’t get silence unless I force it. I am stuck here, with everything, always.
I have never been homesick, you know?
Not once. Because there was never a place that felt like mine in the first place.
When you grow up on something poisonous, you stop calling it poison.
You start calling it normal, comfort even.
That’s what they made. That’s what I became.
And after six months of that, of silence, isolation, of being left alone with something that didn’t quiet down no matter how long I sat with it, they decided I was ready.
Ready for a room, a judge. Words spoken around me instead of to me, my name reduced to something clinical, something procedural, something that could be written down and filed away.
Desecration of human remains, two years.
That’s what they gave me. Two years for what I did.
Nine months already gone, swallowed by those walls, leaving the rest to be served out like it was something that could contain what I had become.
To be completely honest, it didn’t feel like punishment.
It felt more like something that had been waiting for me long before I ever set foot in that cemetery, long before I ever knew what I was capable of.
And as they led me away, as the door closed behind me again, as the sound echoed in that same hollow way it always did, I remember thinking something that should have scared me, but it didn’t.
It didn’t scare me at all actually, because for the first time in a long time, it felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.