At times I wonder to myself why I was ever born with a half decent, fully functional brain; one whose mind seemed to throw everything out of its beloved treasure box, everything but this.
Thinking back to the past, you begin to ponder on the remnants of your life, and the course it has brought you to at present state. Intricacies of every single incident that has ever happened seem to stare back, mocking you, tormenting you. It is at this point that you either continue to descend down memory’s abyss, or break the cursed link from which you have allowed yourself to embrace.
My memory serves as nothing more than a haunted refuge I cannot leave myself isolated with any longer. Doing so would surely transfer the suffering of the soul on to the body, which would in turn reap nothing but carnage and self-destruction.
One would think memories exist for the sole purpose of learning from mistakes. An individual understands their experiences as positive or negative, and takes the proper action to either avoid a pain that nearly destroyed themselves, or relive what they hold to be satisfactory.
Without learning, without understanding, the fire seems pleasant to touch each and every time. It is not until we feel pain, until we bleed emotion, that we are able to contemplate on a much higher level than ever before. In the end, it is this rush of emotion that guides us to knowing ourselves, and understanding our true nature.
Such an emotion lingered within me since childhood, yet I could not begin to understand it until decades later. The sound of wind ruffling through curtains still echoes in my thoughts, a sound I would never be able to forget.
I woke that night to the sobs of David, my younger brother of nine years. Ridding my eyes of sleep, I noticed that he was not lying in the bunk bed on top of mine, but rather next to the door which remained about an inch open.
Crouched over, back leaning against the wall, David’s head drooped down into his chest, arms folded around his legs, clutching them close. I knew something had to be very wrong, David was never one to cry so profusely, especially not in the middle of the night like this. I reluctantly pried the blankets off and sat at the edge of my bed, still rubbing my eyes. Glancing at the night stand, I could make out the time to be about three in the morning, a long ways away from the bus coming to pick us up at the front of the apartments.
“Hey, hey!” I whispered loudly over to him, “What’s wrong?”
David looked up in surprise; I could almost see the lines of tears streaming down his face, never ceasing to stop. He motioned his head towards the slightly open door, which I had just realized was oozing a dim line of light across the floor into the room.
Strange, I thought. We left all lights in the apartment off at night during those days. I came to understand later that this was because of our financial situation, but that was the least of my concerns that night. I remember making my way over to David, who seemed completely out of it, lost in an alternate reality. I knelt down and reached for his hand, clasping it in mine.
“What is it?” I whispered again.
David looked at me with lifeless eyes, shivering and void of feeling. He tried to speak up, but he didn’t have to at that point, it all started to click in my head. An uncomfortable silence could be heard faintly outside the room. Still holding David’s hand, I opened the door ever so carefully, trying to peer out into the hallway that led to the main room.
Fear skillfully trespassed into the back of my mind even though I believed nothing to be wrong at the moment, like the calm before a storm. Here I was, staring down the crack of an open door in the last third of the night, fighting against the urge to walk back to bed and leave David to himself.
Fate, it seems, has a way of catching up with you, no matter what your plan of action is.
At first sight, it felt like I had been shot at point blank. I could feel the bullet piercing the delicate fragments of my skin, making its way through the tender muscles and blood vessels, right into the most precious organ of all. It stopped inside my heart, and over the next few minutes, began to expose the surrounding areas to the coldest sensation one could ever imagine.
My entire chest was taken at this point, and my arms began to go numb. My knees gave away soon afterward, putting me in the exact same position as David’s vegetative state. It was in this moment, these few unprecedented minutes, that I truly felt a void of all emotion.
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