Wherever we are it hurts.

I can’t see her. Instead, I see only the blackness of a pure void, something soft against my back. I sit up. I see grass, going on and on all around me. I’m naked. Interesting. I stand up, feeling the grass on the soles of my feet, and I begin to walk. All directions seem the same, so it’s all just a matter of randomness. I walk, walk, walk. On and on, the passing blades of green become so repetitive they feel like they’re on loop, like maybe I’m not even moving at all. I decided to call her name. I hear nothing, as if I’ve gone deaf. So I keep walking.

I keep walking even when I start to smell the burning. From where I couldn’t say, but to pretend it were my own imagination felt silly. It became clear there was something I wasn’t seeing that just…begged to become known. I stop. I closed my eyes.

“I’m not a good person.”

I opened them. A burning fire. A home falling apart, the sounds of the wood making up its exterior falling apart and crumbling to the ground. The woman next to me seemed to lack expression.

“Mina?”

“I remember waking up on the porch of a cabin. Surrounded by trees. It was night, and the stars hung over me. There was a lake close by, you’d just have to slip down a little steep incline to get to it. I was watching the shore of the place though. Just watching the water come in and back out, again and again.” She didn’t seem eager to talk, as if she were forcing herself. “I remember thinking then that I would be doing the same thing if I were alive, right then. The exact same thing. Then I stopped thinking. Because that was terrifying.” She fell back, almost gracefully falling onto the grass, her eyes staring up at he black void. I follow her lead.

“I remember waking up in a hotel hallway to the sounds of people fucking. I stood up and walked in on them. I watched from the doorway to see three guys filling a girl with their dicks. She couldn’t speak, every noise she made was phallic. Some guy fucking her ass was squeezing her tits and I just couldn’t take it. I called her a slut while I touched myself.”

“Interesting.”

“Quite.” The silence between us felt like death itself.

“Did you want to get fucked like that?”

“Really badly.” She closed her eyes. “I wanted to choke on cum, have my tits bitten and groped, feel my pussy and ass getting stuffed, and jesus, I wanted to get plowed in the eye and feel my blood getting chunky with cum and falling out of my skull.” She chuckled. “I wanted to get fucked to death.”

“That sounds extreme.”

“I also didn’t. I wanted to bleed and curl up in a ball while being held and kissed and loved.” A breath. “So slutty. Yeah. Happiness is the most slutty thing there is.”

“...” I don’t say a word.

“But I was dead, " I told myself. That was exactly why it would never happen.”

“That was a lie.”

“How smart you are god. If I was alive, I’d be just as lonely and pure. Like a good girl.”

“That’s sad.”

“No.” Her voice was harsh. “There’s nothing sad about it.”

“Sorry. What is it then?”

“Unforgivable.”

“How so?”

“Because it’s cowardly.” I feel her hand, tightly gripping my wrist.

“Is purity cowardly?”

“No. That’s powerful. I wasn’t tainted or pure.”

“What were you?”

“A cutter.”

“I see.”

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“A beater. A bleeder. A biter. A scratcher. A whipper. A head slammer. An addict for every and any piece of pain I could inflict.”

“Mina-”

“Cause that was easy! That was so much easier than being a slut! So much easier than being pure and a good listener! Don’t listen to mama, but fear each and every word she tells you!”

“Mina.”

“See how long you last, how long nibbling on the edge satisfies you till you can’t take teasing death’s cunt, and plunge your pocket knife deep inside, and carve out her womb.”

“Did you kill yourself?”

“...”

“Ok.” The silence returned. It returned for a very very long time. For uncountable eternities, and seconds more.

“I wasn’t happy.”

“Yeah.”

“Not in general, but when I did it too.”

“Yeah.”

“Isn’t that cowardly?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think so.”

“I don’t know…” I didn’t know. I would never know. She could repeat every second of it and I’d still be clueless. “But can I pretend to?”

“I don’t care.”

“I remember when mom died.”

“Oh?”

“That’s how far back it goes though. There’s nothing before that. That’s when I was born, I think.” I hold up my other hand. Static. No form. “I remember looking down at her body in that coffin, and looking at her son, and watching him sob his heart out. I wondered how he could be so selfish.”

“Selfish?”

“He didn’t know why he should cry, but he felt like he was supposed to.”

“Did he not love her?”

“He loved her more than anything. He wasn’t ready to stop loving her. So his body just did what it had to as he waited in his head for her to open the front door again.” I gulped. “I hated him. So I bent down and told him his mother wasn’t coming back.”

“...”

“He stopped crying. He stopped doing anything. He left her body in its grave and went home and went back to the life that held no desire to wait for him and just lived.”

“I see…”

“I watched his father a lot more than him. I’d follow him and watch him do all the dirty jobs people richer than him were too rich to do. I remember watching one of them pay him and smoke a cigarette and wondered why they’d do such a thing. Why waste the life they paid to make perfect just to decrease it? I still don’t know why they do that.” I sigh. “His dad didn’t seem much too bothered by his son’s loss of life. He was too busy pretending his wife’s loss of life wasn’t dragging him down to the pits of hell. Do you know what hell looks like for a killer mourning a death?” I looked over at her. “It looks like chaos.”

“C-chaos?”

“Consensus reality doesn’t do well with paradoxes.” I turned my gaze back to the void. “That's why it's so empty.” I smile with no lips. “So with no one to save him, the boy ended up doing the one thing he could. Awaken. He’d already started a long time ago. That’s the whole reason I was born. When it really happened, though, man, it was beautiful. I remember watching that whole house become a graveyard for rotting teddy bears and dissected plastic toys. I wandered through, and found that boy, crying over a mother I don’t know a damn thing about. He looked at me, and asked me to take him to her.”

“What…did you do?”

“Nothing. He did it himself.”

“Jesus…”

“The whole world became white and void, but that boy’s soul remained. All his happiness and sadness and love faded away to a mother waiting above, and what remained cried in silence. It asked from me a purpose. I told it that was impossible. It had already found a definition. And then, I devoured it.”

“...”

“And despite that, it refused to be eaten. It hated itself, lost itself, wanted to disappear, and was just a shell that would never find what it was looking for. Its definition, of mourning, had become impossible to fulfill. Even still, it overpowered me, and created a new definition. Do you want to know what that was?”

“What?”

“Make daddy happy.”

“That’s a definition?”

“When that’s what you are, when you are nothing but that, yeah, that’s definition. Obtained by abandoning purpose. It’s inhuman. It’s godly. Only god’s can be defined, and too strong a will to disappear, it redefined itself. Like a ghost refusing to die. Sounds familiar.” A crack in the void.

“Who am I talking to?”

“A tool for a god.”

“Where is David?”

“Do you want to do that become one thing?”

“...yes.”

“Mmm.” I smile. “Interesting.” I’m surprised when she gets on top of me, grabbing my face.

“Not with you. Be there all you want, but I have no interest in you.”

“You have a preference in who takes you out of here?”

“I didn’t ask you for shit, asshole. Besides…I’m feeling pretty motivated right now.” She smiles, her eyes burning.

“Go ahead and lead it yourself then.” I close my eyes, and feel something soft against my lips. Somewhere inside me, a stronger part of myself wakes.