Sudden flashes of bright lights, frantic, dizzying gaussian blur around the edge of my sight; around 50 or so black spots turn visible, and I knew, because I could count like a vampire, like a man falling asleep; I think my brain took a moment to whirr up, or maybe it was the effects of my long necrotic state of being, but I almost didn't register the colors in the air or the place I was laying. All touch was so numb that I felt I was flying perfectly straight in the air, or that I was riding the sun on my back. Colors came in waves -- first purple, then orange, then red, then blue settled in, and then my least favorite: black, but green took a long, long time to come. In fact, green hadn't come until I got up and touched my fingers together like glueing a snipped wire in my brain.
When I was 14 years old my mom told me that I had no respect for people anymore. It was unusual because I was a well behaved kid before, she said, and that education was a blessing in a place like a camp so close to the harbor, wherein almost no people have lessons since campers desert by the daily, leaving a giant hole of people to educate in its wake. I remember one time I was the only student in class along with a kid who couldn't blink or pronounce the letter E. And I knew that I was worse than him, because my teacher told me so, coupled with my habit of never grabbing a piece of paper unless it had room for doodles.
Then I hit my head really hard on the way back home. It wasn't that bad, to be honest -- it was just a tiny scrape against the concrete floor, which made my vision blur and numb the same way it does every time I awake now. But the rest was my fault. I don't know what got into me. I don't know if I was tired, or just annoyed, but I slammed my head back against the floor until I could feel the inside of my body tingle from the damage being dealt to my nervous system. I was so weak at the end that I couldn't even make it to my house, instead I laid on the floor spasming and vomiting out everything I had eaten for the past few days. Then my mom took me in and informally diagnosed me with severe brain damage.
Did you know I've killed a member of The Few?
It wasn't that hard. One day I was hanging out with my boyfriend, thank the lord for him, and we came upon a nice little fountain with a bench to sit on. I remember the moment like it was right this second, like I could touch him right now if I wanted to. He sat me down and told me he didn't love me. He told me to kill this person -- Kevich Stonewall, Age 63, Occupation: Assistant Manager for Maroon Cleaning Corps. The man had 2 sons and wanted a daughter. The man had schizophrenia. The man was planning on taking a vacation to Seoul. Then my boyfriend told me he was one of the many covert members of The Few, and I laughed, told him "Well if that's the case, why aren't they called The Many?"
He didn't look so happy anymore and told me it was serious. That was when I felt it; the manual override of emotional response, or logical thought, or intuition, because my own smile faded too. And my immediate thoughts receded, like the thoughts that say "Respond with a snarky jab, listen to him," or even "Blabber as loud as you possibly can and run around with your pants pulled down,"
I just remember nodding and standing up. He told me where to go and I went there, waited, found a guy who looked like him with a suit on, pulled a knife from my pocket, (I had no idea I had this knife earlier, it just came when I needed it) trailed him and stabbed him in the neck. He flopped over and didn't even flinch, nor fight. He just keeled over and died. He just died, I remember. I pondered my reflection through the growing pool of his blood for minutes -- all I did was look down, maybe at his back sometimes, where the knife was still implanted. Mostly I just gazed at myself like I was looking at a stranger, unable to really ever comprehend that I had taken a life. Then I grabbed the knife from his leg and walked away.
My head was filled with complicated thoughts and questions asking me if I was devoid of empathy, or if I was missing some part of myself that would usually make me cry and take on a life of pacifism after this, or if I was an evil person now. I didn't really think so. Whenever I gazed at the world I felt the sheer distance between me and everyone else; me and reality, we were very far apart, drifting farther with every second. The distance was far too big for a reasonable hypothesis other than oh, I'm crazy or something, so crazy, and I kill people sometimes because I'm crazy and dumb. As I was thinking a man approached me. He asked me why I was covered in blood and told me I can't be here and said many things along the lines of Maroon and police and go the other way...
I think I might've also stabbed him too, but I'm not sure.
I had trouble moving back to where the fountain was. Not only was it hard to remember, but I couldn't really move my right foot anymore, so I had to limp along like it was broken. Randomly a series of pains would shoot up through my core and find their way to a limb, or my head. It'll stay for minutes at a time before suddenly fading away. That's when I began to feel kinda angry. I don't know why, but the crox lar vorropen, the things around me, everything, that hillokaway, that nerosh, maybe the pain.
Oh.
I met up with my boyfriend then. I found him at the fountain, and we eventually came to our apartment. It was in an abandoned campsite where only we hung out. He knew how to wire power so we had power. Back then we used to do drugs all the time and spray paint our own building while on our trips. That was the funnest part, seeing what we drew when we were intoxicated. He'd sketch some sort of scribble and keep it trailing along the sides until he passed out on the grass and I had to pick him up -- but for me it didn't matter what drug I was on, for I drew the same symbol every time: the obliviorb. It looked like the same graffiti was plastered and copied over itself over and over. The same little obliviorb, eerily steady and accurate next to the fragile scribbles beside it, sometimes over it. That's how I knew drugs worked on us differently. Sometimes when I get on drugs I start thrashing around and crying, or I'll get real mad like I am now and just destroy everything. When that happens I usually think it's my old self coming back to life -- my old self reacting to all the things happening in sporadic instances. Sometimes it happens when I'm sober.
Like today, when we went back to our apartments, and my boyfriend was just about to inject himself and have fun without me, I started to cry. I cried a lot. I curled up and cried and he laughed at me, looking down at me like I was a bug he was going to squash. No matter what he meant with his gaze and his chuckles I went hey, I'm going to squash you instead,
so I got up and stabbed him in the arm.
He began to scream, shed tears, kneeling over in front of me with his hand held on the knife like he was going to die if it wasn't steady enough. There was nothing going on in my head except for the sound of my pumping heart. I did feel a tinge of guilt after a while and ripped up my shirt so he could wrap it around his arm. He didn't accept my shirt scraps, tried to push me away, and then he did the craziest thing -- he pulled out that blade, started to jab it in my direction which would've killed me if I ran into it. I walked a little backward and threw the torn shirt on the floor.
But he just passed out from panic. I'd have thought he died like the other guy if I didn't know any better. Even though I was angry, I still loved him a bit, kind of, enough to put the torn rags on his arm and bandage it up nicely along the wound. I told his knocked-out body he'd have a nasty infection. It didn't respond.
After he woke up he didn't talk to me unless he wanted me to do something for him, which he did sometimes, but he made it a habit now. It stuck for so long -- maybe around a few months or so, before he let up and started having fun with me again, like sex. I never liked sex. I thought I just didn't get it so I'd give it another try, but I still didn't really appreciate it or understand it beyond the slight hurting.
Most of the time when we interact now he'll ask me to kill someone. And I would. I've killed more people than I can remember, every time met with the same returnal to our home and drug trip, sex, or occasional meetup with like-minded oblivionists, maybe even exploring or playing Connect Four. I never won at Connect Four.
One day he gave me a gun and asked me to assassinate a camp official that was about to take a harbor dealing and assimilate without harbor action. The Harbor doesn't really expand because they're focused on controlling an internal city, so this was odd. It was especially odd how I was given a gun even though I've never used one before. He told me that it's because I never needed to use it before, because most people are easy to kill. This guy wasn't.
I don't remember what happened next.
There the camp was, in all of its glory, next to the harbor front which I had trouble crossing. Sometimes I hitchhiked to get over long distances, other times I would just walk like I had now. It took a long time to walk. Sometimes I'd be gone for days before killing someone. The camp was big and had metal fences, and when I knocked on the gate with the gun in my pocket, sticking out so obviously, with my face covered in dampened violence, they, for some reason, opened the door. An old woman ran towards me and talked to me like she recognized me. I couldn't tell what she was saying, or why she was hugging me, but I didn't really mind it.
Did you know I had a pet?
When I was 15 I found a worm in the dirt. It was kind of cute. I took it inside, fed it soil, or at least piled it on my desk, watched it wriggle around, and then it died. I was watching the worm while it stopped moving. Nothing happened when I picked it up, or smacked it against the wall, or even put it back inside -- it was lifeless and limp, like a dead boy's limb. My mom found out and grounded me for neuroticism, endless crying, and utter incompetence. After that I was being taken care of by multiple people: my mom on the weekend, and my teachers on the weekdays. Not even they -- with their superior handling of teenagers -- could keep me in check. Whatever I had, it made me unpredictable, my emotions unstable, my empathy not present, and almost everything done with a robotic sort of curiosity. Then the teachers brought me to the doctor and formally diagnosed me with severe brain damage.
She was holding something in her hand that I also didn't recognize; no matter how hard I tried to focus on it, no matter what angle I went to I couldn't quite tell what it was. All I know is that it made me a little happy to see it, so I took it, and walked past her. She kept trying to talk to me and get me to speak but I ignored it. I think she even tried kicking me. Had I not whipped around I wouldn't have noticed that little thing on her face, kind of like a scuba mask, hung up to a huge tank on her back.
Did you know I have a fear of sharks?
Whipping and whistling
The wind hurts like vines latching onto your back
Keeping you in place while still pushing you
And you don't care, not at all
You let it happen
You look upon the wounds and the blood dripping to the floor
The blood leaking down and flowing between your toes
Between your hands
Like a pattern marked upon you only in moments of hurt
You can still see it when you're fine
Crystallized and frozen beneath clean skin
Broken only these times
Does anybody know that the water scares you?
Does anybody really care about that?
Like a piece of art, or a poem, your downfall is one of the greatest captured moments
Almost every moment of joy, hurt, sadness, disgust, pain
All of them contribute to a greater undoing
To a greater moment submerged in blackness
Away from the light that had disappeared moments ago
And became unattainable when you became familiar
With today's unending dark
Out of nowhere I felt pangs of sadness, and they came in waves; on the first wave tears welled up in my eyes and I stepped back, on the second wave I started to run away, and on the third wave I fell over. My bones locked up in place like I had been trapped in my own body, forced up to my brain to think, which was hard since sensation shot across my brain, and my hands started to shake, and my legs started to shake, and then I couldn't realize, but I knew that in this moment
I was having a seizure.
The world felt like it was too fast for me. I was submerged in total fear, though not fear of my situation, but a fear of my sadness and the realization of how dire things were. I felt my teeth jitter, then the sensation went numb, then it stung like nothing but the guilt I felt. The extreme guilt. It was so bad that it made my stomach ache, and my brain grow dull, and my body burn, and I couldn't think -- just feel, just feeling all of this, letting the sensation take me over.
The rest has faded from my memory. I was exhausted, came up, tried to find the leader of the camp, failed to shoot him (I wasn't good with firearms, they always wobbled and fell from my hands), then stabbed him and got caught. I stabbed a few other people and got stabbed. That woman had a remarkable look of terror on her face. I came home with infected wounds and a bit of lost blood. That was about it, I suppose.
Upon returning and seeing my boyfriend, he came up and asked me about the task and how it went. I said I finished it. He said he loved me. I was so tired I could've slumped into his arms and let myself rest but I didn't, instead leaving the room and sleeping on the floor in the one next door. I don't know why. I was probably just angry at him or something.
In the middle of the night I had awoken to my boyfriend entering the room, bottle in hand. He was drunk. And he was an angry drunk, punctuated with the bottle thrown at me, crashing beside and piercing my ears with the horrible sound. He told me I was a failure. That they knew I did it, not the oblivionists. That they somehow knew my real name. My full name. He threw another bottle at me, and I got so sad that I started to cry again. All I could ever do consistently was cry. And I was so sad, so sad in fact, that I grabbed a glass
shard and shoved it down his mouth.
Like a rabid animal, or a "tamed" crocodile, I was unable to feel love. I must've not had empathy. I must've been evil, because I killed him. I stabbed him while he was choking and cursed at him until he fell over.
He gurgled and twitched and fought out death about as much as he could, but it always wins over in the end, the look of death eventually reaching his eyes. It was odd this time around; when I killed that first guy I didn't really think about how much it hurt, though given this one was my boyfriend I can only assume I felt selfishly sorry for myself that he's gone and I did it and now it's my fault that I won't have him anymore. I won't have Connect 4 anymore. I won't have heroin or whatever he injects into me anymore. I won't have fun anymore, nor walks to the parks, nor that kind of settling feeling that comes in the back of my disgustingly static mind telling me it's fine, although it is fucked up, it's still fine.
I think The Harbor was just an obstacle meant to symbolize something in my life. I don't really know what it means though. I fumbled with my pocket until I produced the unknown object I stole from that lady earlier, and while it was still weird and rotund, I snapped it open, and when I did I saw my face. It's me as a kid with no smile in sight. I'm looking at the camera awkwardly, like I'm seeing a creepy stranger.
I couldn't sense the connection there.
Written by Nicole Buuward (8/29/26)