Why Did I Pray to Be Left Alone?
I sit alone most nights, entombed in a silence so complete it feels like penance. No friends cross the abyss. No family bothers to summon my name. The dark has learned the shape of my body better than any living thing.
It is unfair, this slow burial. And yet the question festers like an open wound: Do I deserve even this much?
I reach toward others with broken hands, offering what little warmth I still possess, only to watch them recoil. They sense the rot in me — the years of stunted growth, the soul warped and atrophied, unfit for human weather. I do not blame them.
I miss the dogs. Their uncomplicated love was the last pure light I was ever allowed to stand near. Now even that small mercy is gone.
I miss my parents, though I suspect my memory has long since faded from their minds like a stain scrubbed from old stone. I miss my sister more cruelly still — the venom I poured into her childhood years still echoes in my skull, a debt that can never be forgiven, a sin that grows heavier with time.
The job grants me nothing but bare tolerance — gray figures orbiting at a careful distance, acknowledging my presence only as one acknowledges a persistent shadow on the wall.
I dared, once, to ask a girl if she might step into my dim circle. The revulsion that twisted her face was honest. A clean verdict. Yes. I am that hideous. The mirror has been kinder than she was.
On my days off I drown in videogames, chasing ghosts through glowing corridors that used to promise escape. Now they only remind me how thoroughly hollow I have become. Every victory tastes of rust.
I waste what little money I have on sugar and grease and bright poison, feeding the only appetite that has not yet learned to despise me. Food remains my final, shameful companion — a dull narcotic for a dying animal.
I came here carrying foolish, burning hopes. One by one they have guttered out, leaving only smoke and scorched ground behind.
Now I sit in the ashes and want nothing more than to go home — though I know, with terrible clarity, that home no longer exists, and even if it did, the door would not open for what I have become.
Each day I wait with bated breath. Hoping. Praying. Wishing for this to end.