Chapter 46 #2
My hand came up slowly, almost hesitant now, like I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to touch it, fingers pressing into the wound, feeling the split skin, the wet heat, the way it pulsed under my touch.
Real. Always had been.
My reflection stared back at me in broken pieces, fractured, but there was no second face anymore, just me, bleeding from the same place I had always sworn belonged to someone else.
And something in my chest, what little was still holding, finally gave out.
I couldn’t move. Everything in me locked up at once, like something had grabbed hold of my spine and squeezed until there was nothing left to work with, and all I could do was stand there with blood sliding down my face, staring at something I didn’t want to understand but already did.
Too many fucking thoughts all at once, no space between them.
Just blow after blow after blow, like they were crashing into each other inside my skull– splintering, multiplying, getting louder the more I tried to catch even one of them and hold onto it.
You’re breathing, that’s enough. That has to be enough. If air is still going in, then I’m not gone yet. If I’m not gone yet, then I’m fine… right?
No.
No, that didn’t feel right, nothing felt right.
I stepped back again, slower this time, like I was moving through something thick, something that had resisted me, until the back of my legs hit the bed and my body just gave in without asking me.
Knees bending, dropping down hard onto it like I’d lost whatever it was that usually kept me upright.
My elbows dug into my thighs, my hands came up and I grabbed my face, hard.
Palms pressed into my eyes like I could push everything out, like I could stop the thoughts from coming if I just held myself together tight enough.
Did I even talk?
That thought didn’t come gently, it tore through everything else.
All those years, all those fucking years, did I ever actually say anything out loud? Or was it just him?
Just that voice, always there, always answering, always filling the silence so I didn’t have to notice it. Krystyna, I talked to her.
Didn’t I?
No, not really. Only single words, nothing that held. My stomach twisted.
The psychiatrist. I told him things during the lobotomy, I remember that, standing there, looking at him, talking to him.
Did I?
Or did I just stand there while everything played out inside my own head, convincing myself it was happening out loud because it felt easier than admitting there was nothing coming out of my mouth at all?
“Fuck…” It slipped out under my breath, or at least I thought it did.
Did I just say that?
I froze again, completely, hands still pressed to my face, breath caught halfway in my throat. I didn’t dare to move my mouth, didn’t dare to try again, because what if… what if nothing came out?
What if I’d spent all those years thinking I could speak, thinking I was choosing not to, thinking it was control, when in reality there was just… nothing?
My chest tightened again, worse this time, deeper, like something was closing in from inside, pressing against my ribs, my lungs, my throat.
I tried to take a breath, but it didn’t go all the way in, it got stuck halfway, like my own body was blocking it.
Panic crawled up fast. I pressed my hands harder into my face, fingers digging into my skin, dragging down over my mouth, over my jaw– like I needed to feel it, needed to make sure it was still there, still mine, still something I could use.
But I couldn’t open it. Because the second I did, I’d known, and if I’d never had a voice, if everything I thought I’d said had only ever existed inside my own head, then what the fuck was I?
My thoughts kept slamming into each other, faster now, louder, no pause, no break, just a constant spiral that wouldn’t slow down, wouldn’t give me a second to breathe, wouldn’t let me out and suddenly, my own body felt too small, too tight.
Like I was trapped inside it, like there wasn’t enough room in my chest for everything that was trying to exist in there at the same time.
I dragged in another breath, short, and for the first time…
not the cell, not the wall, not the locked door, my own skin felt like a cage.
I tried to force air into my lungs, again, again, again.
Slow enough that it actually went somewhere this time, didn’t just stop halfway like before, didn’t bounce back up like my own body was refusing it, but pushed down, stayed there for a second, then came out in a long, controlled drag like I was trying to prove to myself I still had some kind of say in what happened inside me.
It didn’t feel like control, but it was…
something, and right then, something was all I had.
In, hold, out.
My hands slid down from my face, like they didn’t quite belong to me anymore.
Elbows still digging into my knees, my head hanging forward just enough that the blood kept dripping, hitting the concrete on soft taps that felt way too loud in a room that small.
I focused on that, the sound, the rhythm, anything that wasn’t…
everything else. I tried to think, not let it split into a thousand directions again, force it into something I could actually look at without it tearing me apart.
My whole life. It didn’t feel like a timeline, didn’t feel like something I could line up and follow.
It felt like pieces, violent ones, all of them pointing in the same direction whether I wanted them to or not.
I knew what I had been made into. Not born, made, shaped.
Forced into something that didn’t quite bend, didn’t soften, didn’t get the luxury of asking for anything gentle because nothing about where I came from had ever allowed it.
I had been a weapon long before I knew what that meant, and somewhere along the way, I had stopped questioning it, stopped wanting anything else.
But sitting there, blood still running down my face, my head splitting open from the inside, my thoughts finally slow enough that I could actually hear them, I was so fucking tired of it.
Tired of being a knife, tired of being something that only knew how to cut, how to break, how to survive by turning everything into damage before it had the chance to touch me first. I didn’t want to be that anymore.
I didn’t even know what the alternative looked like, but I knew I couldn’t keep being this.
Because what even was I at that point?
What did being human mean to something that had never actually been allowed to feel it?
That had never known what it was like to exist without violence sitting right under the surface, waiting for the smallest excuse to come out?
The thought made my stomach turn. I had spent my entire life inside something I didn’t understand and now, suddenly, I understood too much.
Every choice, every moment, every time I had crossed a line and never once looked back, I could see it all.
And I was still in there, still watching it happen, that was the worst part.
Not the things I had done, not even the fact that there had never been anyone else there to blame, it was that I was fully aware of it now.
Fully awake inside something that had already happened, already been done, already been set in motion long before I ever stopped to question it.
I wasn’t just the one who did it, I was the one who had to sit with it, watch it, live in it and I couldn’t look away.
I couldn’t carry it. Not the memories, not the way everything had folded in on me until there was nothing left to separate me from any of it.
It didn’t sit somewhere I could process, didn’t stay in my head where it belonged, it spread, filled everything, pressed against my ribs, my throat, behind my eyes until there was no space left to exist in without it touching me. I didn’t want to be in it.
I didn’t want to be in me.
That was the part that hit hardest, this overwhelming, suffocating need to get out of my own skin, like it had turned into something too tight, something I couldn’t breathe inside anymore. I stood up and walked toward the sink.
The broken mirror caught the light in pieces.
I crouched, fingers closing around one of the larger shards, feeling the edge bite into my skin just enough to register, just enough to remind me it was real, that this was real, that I was still there.
That was the problem. I straightened again, turned, walked back to the bed like I had all the time in the world, like nothing was wrong, like my head wasn’t tearing itself apart from the inside.
Sat down, elbows on my knees for a second, just sitting there, holding it. Then I moved.