Revenir

I'm sure the title of the post might be confusing. 

I truly don't know where to start or how to explain each bit so every stranger that reads this will believe it. Maybe it doesn't matter if you do believe me. After all, what does it change if you do or don't. I feel like I'm changing and I want someone, anyone to know who I was. Not an abused child, not a thief, a sex worker. Who I was before. I know that I wasn't always this way. 

I'll try to be vague with my personal details. Though, I'm going to be honest, It wouldn't be that hard to find out who I am. Due to the ways I have monetized this “talent.” As well as the many things I had been a victim of. Changing my name only helped so much, and after the third or fourth time I think I stopped caring. 

As you read this, know that I do not want your pity, your sorrow, 

and absolutely not your prayers. Because if God does live up there somewhere, he has rightfully averted his gaze. 

I was born in 2006. I wasn't found in a vat of radioactive goo, or fell to earth in some chrome space craft. Though as I got older and became conscious of myself I wouldn't of minded those origins. 

Small town, The kind other towns an hour away have never heard of. A no one girl, dresses, ribbons ;abusive parents. The kind you see documentaries about. The kind you can feel the rot exhaling from their mouth when they speak.

I never felt different, or odd. I looked the same as everyone else, no growing appendages or pustules. I dressed in what clothes I was given, which was usually some thrifted junk that smelt like it had maybe been washed once. When I started going to school I found it hard to make friends. I wasn't exactly keen on others. The only other people I knew at the time were my parents, and they didn't give a good first impression about the rest of humanity. 

I eventually made a friend in another girl I'll call Dee for the purpose of the story. She was kind, outgoing and helped me see that people could be kind, even more, be kind with no expectations of anything in return. I know I was young, but even my small underdeveloped brain felt the kindness, like drinking hot cocoa on a freezing day. It warmed from the inside. 

These handful of years went by normally. What I thought was normal. School was where I wanted to be, with Dee. Home was the usual fair of food being taken away for simply speaking to my father in what he considered disrespectful tones. My mother was always there to make sure that I couldn't escape the tirade. I spent all my hours at home hiding in my room. I was lucky enough to have one, I think they allowed it so they could shove me in it when they were tired of screaming at me. 

I understand what comes next may churn your stomachs, upset you. I hope it does, that means you have empathy. But consider this your warning. Things won't get easier. I have found out they rarely do. 

My father upgraded his cruelty when I turned ten. He was my first. I mean that in both ways you might be thinking. But the important one for now is the purpose of this post. He was the first person that killed me. 

Months of abuse that led to that night felt like years. There wasn't anywhere I could go. The one time I ran away, trying to find refuge at Dee's house. Her mom didn't believe my accusations towards my parents and she called them almost immediately to come get me, as if I was a rat that showed itself in the kitchen. Dee pleaded with her on my behalf. At that point she knew about it all, she always begged me to tell someone, and I always refused out of fear. Now that I was finally doing as she asked, I was met with the cold face of an adult that refused to believe a child. 

When my parents came to get me I thought about continuing to run, just sprinting towards the edge of town and into the woods. That way at least I would die away from them. But fear of death kept me from doing it, I was naive enough to think my father would never kill me. 

My parents pulled me from school the next morning. Said they would homeschool me. 

It was just them closing the cage for good. 

As it happened, dying turned out to be one of the best things to have happened to me up to that point, besides Dee of course. I was only around twelve by this point, a caged bird, crippled wings; you know the imagery. I was numb to it, to all of it. Every time they came into my room I debated fighting back, but now that I was homeschooled, they had no restraint on the beatings. Before being careful not to create marks. Now, it was all fair game. So I usually would just cry, close my eyes and try to focus on anything else to dull the edge of it all. 

It was the night I had stopped caring about what harm would follow, I fought that night. As hard as a twelve year old could fight off two full grown adults. I jammed a small plastic toy into my father's arm, and that was worthy of death to the devils I called parents. I think he always wanted to do it. 

I just gave him an excuse. 

His thumbs around my neck, he pushed so hard I could hear my neck break and a numbness take over me. It was a while before the black finally took me. Unfortunately, I remember it all, the gasping, the struggling. His spit misting across my face. Then I remember a canvas of black and true relief. Like a breath I had been holding since I was conscious, I was finally able to exit my lungs. 

It wasn't like when you sleep. There was nothing. I was so young I hardly had any grasp on the concept of death at that age. Though the feeling wasn't like sleep, how time passed was. It felt like only moments when I could start to feel ice cold running water, a slight morning breeze and the chirping of birds. I was laying on my back, half in a creek. I could hear the sound of cars wooshing by not far away. The biting cold felt like needles across my skin. I was still covered in marks that my father had left on me, as well as a black liquid, nearly sheen across my skin. It moved around my fingers as I ran them through it. It clung to my body like a skin tight gown of pure night. Running into the creek in beautiful long strokes that looked as if purposefully done by some cosmic painter. That morning I woke up was very special to me. Sometimes I still dream about it. 

The bittersweet feeling of waking up when my adolescent mind finally knew relief in that black ocean of nothing. The birds, the water running over stones and through gripping algae. Down stream running with the black that slowly sloughed away from my body.  

Almost in a daze I walked up the embankment onto the road. The first car that saw me pulled over immediately. A lovely couple, young, much younger than my mom and dad. They covered me, dried me off. Called the police. 

I remember staring at the woman's face for so long. I didn't know it at the time, but the amount of times I have gone through the process, I know I was looking for confirmation I was really alive. I don't think a person's mind is meant to come back like I did. I think if I was older when it first started it might have broken me completely.

I still think about her eyes. Genuine concern. Welling tears, a look I had only ever seen in Dee. I think if I wasn't so disoriented I would have cried with her. 

I remember them asking me over and over where my parents were, why I was miles away from town and naked. I assume I was in shock, my tiny mind trying to decipher each question as I didn't even know how to answer them. The only words I was able to muster to the lady police officer that arrived on scene was, 

“My dad killed me.” 

What followed was more police than I'd ever seen in my life. Questioning me over and over. I tried to answer everything as honestly as a traumatized child could. 

“He killed me.”

“I woke up here.” 

In the context it makes sense for a child to say when she had been a victim to such atrocities. But I wished I could have reframed it so they could understand what I meant. 

Even though I was confused, a few hours later in a cozy warm room of some county-run building I was believing that I wasn't killed at all. Just survived. I did have marks across my neck and other parts of my body. It made sense, and what would you believe? That you died and came back in such a manner or that you were just assumed dead and thrown out like trash. 

It was easy for me to think of myself as trash, so the narrative was the easiest for me to grasp. 

The police were quick to get everything in order to go to my house to search it, gather more evidence of what had happened and arrest them. It wasn't until much later, I was able to watch the body cam footage of the encounter. 

The cops approached the door, they were cordial, friendly even when my mother opened the door. She looked like nothing had happened. Even wore the same scowl she would wear when she looked at me. Like my very existence was meant to mock her. Each wrinkle in her aging face catching the shadows in just the right way to show the monster under the sagging skin. 

“Is your husband home?” A young officer said who was immediately greeted by the roar of my father from the living room. 

“Tell them to fuck off.” The voice could curdle milk. 

“You heard him. Leave.” My mother followed the yell with a hiss through her coffee stained teeth. The cops seemed stalwart, unwavering to their hideous insides being shown. What followed was a lot of yelling. After a struggle they both ended up in the back seat of a police cruiser. The search started off mundane, my parents were smart enough to keep anything in view nice and tidy, like no soul would ever come to harm in this house. All the corruption ran below the surface. They found fluids on my bed, blood and hair. It was when they crawled into the attic that things really unraveled. 

There was a tarp rolled up and tucked behind one of the support beams. They found my blood, and that slick oil I woke up in was coating the inside of it. The police concluded it is what he must have used to transport me to the creek, but something in me knew that wasn't it. 

I was watching them interrogate my parents through a shitty little camera they had in the room. When the detective told him they had found me, he didn't flinch. He did when they said,

“Alive.”

“Alive?”

His face went pale, like all the blood rushed into his diseased heart. The first time in my life I saw anything other than anger and perversion on his swollen face. He receded into himself, each question after, simply confused him more. He knew he had killed me, thought he did? I didn't know at the time.

I felt almost nothing. The lady cop must have seen this as she was never very far from me. Even visiting me when I jumped from the county building to foster home. She tried so hard to talk me through each step. Make sure I was smiling.

I fear what she would say if she could see me now.

I wish I could say my parents faced justice for what they did to me. I suppose they did in some fashion. It was the trails when I would have to see them, and even worse be in the same room as them. I had kept hearing stories from the detectives working the case that each day they both were growing more unstable. Like something broke in them when they were brought in. The detectives were worried they wouldn't be found mentally competent to stand trial. Lucky, and unlucky they were deemed competent. Though I imagine it was close because when they saw me, walking to testify. Sitting in that chair in that little box. It wasn't regret, remorse, empathy I saw in their eyes. 

It was fear. They were afraid of me, a now thirteen year old girl. 

They never took their blown out pupils off me as I answered questioned, recounted my story. The lawyers were nice enough. Even their lawyer. I liked to think he didn't want to represent them. But that is just what I told myself. 

Somewhere in all of it, they both rushed the stand. Shouting and reaching out for me through the bailiff's grip. They had overpowered the bailiff before the other officers could pull them off. My dad had wrestled one of their guns from its holster. The cacophony of noise that followed was like hell itself poured through the hardwood floor. By the end, both of them lay dead. Arms spread out like they were reaching for me. Blood pooling across that shiny dark wood floor.

I didn't know what my father was yelling when he was rushing towards me. It wasn't until I was able to watch the trail. Oddly enough on the same YouTube channel I found the bodycam footage of their arrest. I remember scrolling through the comments. 

“They got what they deserved.”

“Swift justice.”

“Hell is too good for them.”

“Does anyone else think it's odd what the father said?” I was pulled into the replies to this comment. 

“He's nuts. Probably shouldn't have even been in that courtroom. Just thrown in an asylum.”

“It is weird.”

“What did he say? I can hardly hear it and the dog shit subtitles aren't helping.”

“You were in pieces.” 

My name has been changed since all of this, but I am sure a quick search would find the news articles about the case. From thirteen to seventeen I was a fairly normal teen. I had almost completely forgotten about what had happened with enough therapy and medication.

When I was seventeen was when things started to feel a bit too familiar. Teachers, strangers looking at me like my cockroach of a father used to. I was no longer timid, I couldn't be. Calling these people out when I would notice. As good as it made me feel to be able to stand up for myself. I am sure this is what led to my second death. A college student that was a teacher's aid. Tried to rape me in the girls locker room. When I continued to fight him off, he began to slam my head against those disgusting floors. Just like before, I felt the initial pain in flashes of white before that black paint soaked my reality. 

I would end up waking up at some construction sight at the edge of town. Like before, it was like meeting someone you can't place the name of or where you met them. Someone helping me, police getting involved and another person deeply confused how a teenager that they brutally murdered, dismembered and stuffed into trash bags, then thrown into the trash could be standing in front of them. He was sent away for a decade or so for the “attempted murder and rape.” of me. He got off light considering to everyone else he never had killed me. 

I left town after that. Down to San Francisco. I wanted to be away from all that. To no one's surprise, I was homeless. I had no where to stay and though I held down diffrent part time jobs, it was never enough to get me a place to stay. And most people where hesitant about letting a seventeen year old runaway be their roommate. Hunger was a driving force that kept me striving for some way to make more money. 

This is when I decided to monetize this special thing of mine. Not before testing it again or course. Maybe test isn't the right word. I was committed to either getting out of this situation or out of this life. It was a win-win. I needed a sure fire way, as well as it preferably costing me no money, far away from people. I decided to swim out into the bay one night. Went under and kept myself there until things went quite again. This wasn't my best idea. Drowning was agony, your brain fights you. It knows it needs oxygen and it wants only survival. 

Well, I won that argument. 

Just like every other time I woke up; naked, covered in that oil slick. This time I was on the opposite side of the golden gate. Off the 101 in a ditch. I was starting to learn bits. I never just woke up where I had died. It was always miles away, but no more than ten miles or so. 

My test was a success, at least to me. Though part of me was sad I woke up at all. 

I started to subtly advertise a service that no pervert would ever turn down. The chance to kill a young girl. No consequences if they followed directions and paid upfront. I wish this enterprise took off overnight, but it was still a few months before I caught a sicko on my fishing line. Teenage girl, amazing bait, only second to young boys. I had saved enough for a phone and had a select few people give my number to “interested individuals.” Which meant human trash. Within the next few months I had enough money to lease a small little cottage on the bay. No one wanted it due to the disrepair but I thought it was charming. I'm not going to get into the rules I had or how these encounters went down. Not because of some ‘trade secret”. More so that they were quite boring and recounting them all would bore you. 

I lied to myself that I was allowing these murders to live out their fantasy on someone that couldn't die. I should have been turning them in, but I needed the money and many of them, extremely wealthy men who paid piles of money to explore every sick twisted fantasy. It wasn't a feeling I could wash off in the shower. And on top of it, each time that black canvas of silence would grow a little louder. Like a rumbling. Whales singing in the ocean. 

Up until now I never noticed any changes in myself. Until this most recent time. Which is why I'm here, making a post. Otherwise what would I have to complain about? Not being able to die? Sounds amazing for something so fleeting as the human lifespan. 

Some rich dick with a hard on for suffering, so the majority of my customers. The first time since my father I felt fear as the lights began to fade. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Despite the “normality” of the situation in all the aspects that mattered. There was something underneath it all. A knife hid under silk sheets. You know it's there, but your mind can think of other things that oddly shaped lump could be. Even though the silhouette is unmistakable. 

I grew confident in my inventive way of making money. It was common enough. Monthly maybe a bit more frequently, I kept the roof over my head and food in my fridge, and a lot growing in my bank account. I could stroll into a strip club and hand a rusty spoon to the most unhinged man I could find. (spoiled for choice.) and I'm sure he would happily open up my body in front of everyone without much prompting, and I could do it with a sure-of-myself smile and not much of a fuss. However, the longer the night went on, the more of the knife I mentioned would reveal itself. He was one of the few who wanted to fuck before everything went down. I didn't mind, I got to say yes or no, but the amount of money he was offering definitely swayed me towards “yes”. 

He was a handsome enough man, which was one of the few departures of the norm. Most of the men were Incel types. Violent, cowardly, stupid. Aspects of their personality that seeped out their pores like a thick sludge and coated their feeble spines. This man, I learned that night how good a liar someone can be. You think I would have learned by now. Like I said, I had grown confident, and that led to stupidity on my part. 

The fuck was fine. Short, disappointing and frankly boring. But of course I made him think none of those things were true. 

One of my golden rules was always forefront in the conversations leading to the deed. Killing me is the point, do not prolong it.

This man didn't care for that rule. The night turned to morning and I was broken. Left strung to the footboard of the bed. The first few hours I fought tooth and nail when I realized what he was doing. Also to preemptively answer the question. “Why don't you carry a gun or something?!” I do. I carry a tazer, pepper spray and a small caliber pistol. Before I realized I wasn't dead and woke up still strung up like some sort of pathetic Jesus Christ. I was well restrained.

“I want to see it.” He would say between each crack of his knuckles across my body. 

“But you are so much fun as you are now.” The words of an exasperated, but elated man. A man that caught a rabbit and delights in the screeching pain it emits at his touch. I drifted in and out of consciousness, almost begging to pass away so I could leave that place. I think a different plea was louder. One that overode fear, rage. 

Knowing I wake up after it doesn't sound as bad, but I mentioned it before. I still feel it all. And no matter your tolerance, there are things that your body will never be prepared for. Things your mind hides from even you. 

On the second night I finally died. The thrumming black was a relief compared to the throbbing pain of red sleep I endured.

The deep warble wail roared through it, like standing in a hurricane I felt it moving past me. Though there was no air, or light. It shifted around me like blood moves around the perforating point of a knife to the heart. Like those black brush strokes in that cold creek. 

When I woke up I felt different. Better than usual. My mind was slow to adjust to the feeling, and slower to understand how I was still in his home. I wasn't bound, my body marked but healed comparatively from the pain he inflicted. The blood stains he pulled from me still stained the plastic wrapping I laid on. I walked like a new born deer into the living room. 

I found him there. 

It was an image captured perfectly in my mind like a Polaroid. 

I had died so many times, I had never seen the aftermath that death churned up with its wake. He painted much more of the room in blood then I did the bedroom. He laid with his head down, his arms up with his hands over his head, as if protecting himself from something. As I looked closer I could see he was perfectly sculpted. Each arm, leg, even down to the fingers split from their original resting places. And replaced like segments of a wooden doll. Balanced on one another, from a distance you would think a man was just praying. The closer you got the more gore revealed itself.

I had never puked so much. There was nothing to expel, it didn't stop my body from trying. As I spit the bits of acid that had come up, that was when I felt something odd. 

Running my tongue across my teeth, feeling the flat surfaces of my molars and sharp edges of my incisors. I did the same along the bottom row. Then across the second row behind the first. An entire new set of teeth. Jagged and crooked jutting from my hard palette. Worse still, it moved. Like the cap of a knee does under the skin, but retains its proximity to the leg. This other set moved. I ran to the mirror, staring at the dark brown layers of dried blood that caked on my body. No black oil slick, just cracking blood stains. I pulled my mouth open wide. As my jaw opened the new set shifted in its place, closing a bit, they were dark, I could feel a throb of pain like a radiating tooth ache from hell. I stepped back and sat on the toilet. Checking my body for anything else. To my temporary relief, the rest of me seemed fairly normal. I took over a half an hour trying to compose myself. Rubbing my hands on my thighs trying to ground myself. Then my tongue would touch the interloper teeth and the panic would well up in my empty stomach. 

I spent a long time staring at his body once I left the bathroom. The more I looked at it the prettier it began to look. Not him, but his pose. It's kind of a quiet prayer. A humble cleric bowed before a saint. He even had the robes, just his where made of his viscera that spilled from his inside and around his bent knees. 

The teeth wouldn't be the only change. God, I wish It had been. Though I have yet to die again. The changes are still coming. Slow, painful. All of me shifts to accommodate when it happens. I really don't know why I'm writing this. Took me long enough to get his computer turned on and open, I thought that maybe if people just knew how I existed before. Then maybe when I stop being me. It won't be so bad. I'm going to stay here. I've barricaded the doors and covered the windows. I know people will come looking for him. Especially after this. I'm afraid of these changes, afraid of what brought them about. 

I think the rumbling in the black followed me this time. Though I'm glad you took the time to read this. 

I really fear for your safety. 

I think maybe I did really die that first time. 

How much is even still me?

if any.