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When the concepts of pain and pleasure become intertwined with those of morality and sin, one understands from an early age that pleasure is an end state, achieved consistently only after the trials and tribulations are overcome. Pain, then, is the road to happiness. Pain is the mark of dragging oneself into the Angel’s light. You have known this for most of your life.
Well, you never much cared about what the Angel thought. Nor did you care for church; fidgety little you could never stand the two hour lectures without something to even do in the meantime. But lately, you find yourself gravitating a little to the Angel’s teachings. You find yourself in need of something, a little light, and you’re getting desperate. After all, there is something inside you.
It’s a soul. Not your soul. Or a parasite attached to your soul? It actually doesn’t matter, you know, what matters is that it isn’t yours. It is in you but it isn’t you. You’re not you, not anymore.
You are taking a long walk. The moon is bright, nearly full; the forest was dappled in silver just enough to see by. This is a moment for you, a moment away from it. You’re trying to enjoy it. Instead, you think about your thighs rubbing together against the corduroy of your pants. You start walking faster. You blast music loud in your earbuds as if that’ll chase the thoughts away. It doesn’t, of course, but you think it helps.
You are breathing hard, harder than you should be considering you do this all the time. You should be more accustomed to it by now, right?
Then again, you used to do this more slowly. Maybe you weren’t trying hard enough back then, and now you’ll have to make up for it. Maybe you should do another hour tomorrow, if you can get the soul to loosen its grip long enough to tear it out. Let’s see if you can catch it off guard.
Your stomach is cramping. You let out a small hiss without wanting to, so you take a piece of gum out of your pocket, crumpling up the wrapper in your palm. You let the wrapper fall. There are probably dozens of these wrappers lining your route, dozens of little pieces of evidence that you exist. The gum always tastes the same. You always buy watermelon – which tastes like sweet chemicals. It’s delicious.
You have gotten to the end you designated for yourself long ago: a fence through the middle of the woods. You have, of course, climbed the fence and explored the other side. It’s mostly more forest, until it finally hits a road. Nothing you can’t get within the fence’s perimeter. You turn back around to head home.
✢
You meet Susie the day after – really meet her, with her arm pinning you against the lockers, with the shine of her axe down in the dark world of the closet – and by the end of it, she thinks she’s your friend. Decides it, really. But that can’t be real, can’t be permanent, because your suffering isn’t over yet. You haven’t overcome this yet, haven’t figured out how to tear that thing out of your chest forever and stay standing. You just need to figure out how to not need it.
But Susie is overwhelming that impulse: her carefree attitude, her conviction to be big and loud and unapologetic. It’s just too much to take in all at once, not without eroding some walls in the process. So it’s really not your fault you get attached, even as you know any fondness she holds for you is an illusory thing, because it’s not you saying it all. She likes the soul version of you, the one that crawls into your chest like a spider, looking for a cavity to infest; she likes the thing that is not you more than she likes you, and you know this, but in the painting you made of your memories, she was smiling. She was smiling at you.
Not your mother’s weary one she makes at you nowadays, waiting for one of them to break through to you. Not Noelle’s awkward little grins when you pass in the hall, set behind a wall of glass between you. It was toothy, sharp, sincere. The thought passes that this is salvation.
✢
You don’t like mirrors. This is unfortunate, as apparently, the soul has found it necessary to check the hallway mirror every chance it gets. Your body turns to face it. You see the thing you’re trapped in, the prison of form you were given the moment of your birth. It is a short, oddly proportioned thing; it’s covered in a dry, flaking membrane of yellow-brown that stretches grossly over the bones. It distributes fat in all the wrong places: chest and hips, thighs and ass, so that you feel every brush of sweater against its too-soft curves, so that you can’t forget. You taste iron in its mouth as you stare.
(You can’t escape it. The thing they call “you”.)
✢
It’s not even hard anymore. It was in the beginning, back when your stomach wasn’t accustomed to the deprivation. When your mother started watching out that you were eating breakfasts and dinners. When she tried to reason with you. You are beyond reason. You know this, you knew this, and you tell yourself you don’t care.
The soul didn’t seem to care. Or at least, it didn’t do anything about it – simply sat at the table when called and stood up when excused. You used to be relieved for this one small mercy. Now you’re just angry.
You don’t usually come downstairs for dinner now, or else make sure to be out of the house. The dark worlds have been great for that. Not only are they reprieves from your normal life, but nothing you eat in there is real. It’s all free – the salsa, the cake, every dark candy you ate along the way, fucking moss because you were hungry and you could – none of it matters.
You are still, of course, left with the emptiness in your stomach afterwards. That used to bother you. You remember the sheer disappointment when you finally broke and ate something, only for you to feel even hungrier afterward, for some reason. Your hunger – and your lack of control over it – scared you. It was going to become too much, one day, and you’ll break completely. What would happen then? Would you gain all the weight back and more, stuffing your face to appease your endless hunger? Would you kill yourself? Which would be worse?
Now, though, you find some kind of comfort in your hunger. It’s proof that you’re enduring, that you’re on the path to shaping yourself into someone who could be happy. Who could maybe deserve it, too. You don’t want to let it go. You’re so, so scared of letting it go.
✢
Ralsei is… odd. He unsettled you at first, with his manufactured cuteness and his fixation on you. Or maybe on your soul? But when he pulls you aside, he talks to you like you are a martyr, bearing the burden of possession, the loss of oneself, for the sake of everyone in every world.
He thinks that he, as well as the two of you, are the heroes foretold in the tale of Delta Rune. It’s as if you’re hanging out with a priest who worships you as a saint. You don’t much like prophecies. They taste just a little too strongly of being told who to be.
But regardless, as you get to know him you start to see him a little clearer, lonely and scared and desperate for purpose. Desperate to make an impact on someone, anyone. And maybe you understand, a little bit, wanting to feel like you’re going towards something. Like you aren’t just festering right where you have always been. Stagnant water.
You find some part of yourself wanting to know him, really know him, outside of who he must be. What has been prescribed for him. You aren’t sure what to do with that desire. You set it aside, for now.
✢
You fantasize, sometimes, about not having a body at all. Or maybe not having a brain to form opinions about it. You think about floating in space, star-spotted and endless in every direction. Nothing to think. Nothing to feel. Just stars.
You want rest.
✢
At Noelle’s house, there is always a snack tray. It lays invitingly out on the coffee table, carefully arranged by Carol and implemented by Noelle herself. You once asked Carol why they always had snacks, back when you were much younger and didn’t know to keep interaction with her to a minimum. She said that at any time, guests could come over, and a household must be ready to feed them. They asked why Noelle wasn’t allowed to have any, then. She sighed, as though she were put upon, and said monsters can’t eat too much, or they’ll become unhealthy.
At the time, you fiddled with the headband you were going to never wear again three weeks later. Could you not stay a monster if you were unhealthy? Then, maybe that’s why you weren’t a monster. Maybe you weren’t healthy, and if you were you could become a monster again.
You’re not so delusional now. You are who you are. Or, who you are made to be.
(No one can choose who they are in this life.)
You rip out your nosy, insensitive little parasite in Dess’ room. It writhes in your grip. You can barely walk now, your chest gaping open. The ache, the emptiness, this is freedom. This is you, only you. Not that you’re a particularly decent person to be. But – once you push past it all, once you come out the other side – maybe you could become someone better. Someone worthy of all of the care and attention that chafes so much.
There is a caterpillar that eats at you, all the time, eats at this cocoon because it – the wall of flesh and bone – is the barrier to breach before it can unfurl into a butterfly. You’ve tried to let it out, before, with the knife you carry like a security blanket. It doesn’t work, not fully, but there is some decompression there, some relief. Pain is the precursor to transformation.
You shove your soul in a box in a storage closet. You go to the kitchen and chug chocolate milk because you can feel your knees start to buckle and your head won’t stop swimming and you need sugar immediately or you’re going to collapse. And, maybe a little because you haven’t had chocolate milk in months. Since you became infested, you think.
You ignore the caller talking once again about the plan you’ve heard over and over again by now, because they think you’re too stupid or deviant to listen. They all think so little of you. Fucked up little human weirdo. Can’t talk right, can’t think right, can’t care right. You move to the piano, dusty from disuse, and begin to play for the first time in forever. This, you’re good at. This, and hurting.
✢
When you come back home, Susie in tow, you find your mother dancing and drinking with- With the guy at the grocery store. With that asshole. And Susie leaves, because of course she does, because your mom is drunk with a guy she met today probably, and she didn’t even care that you were gone, and she smiles like nothing’s wrong, and is Asriel going to come home to this? Is he going to come back to his mom dating the fucking cashier guy??
She tells you there is pie in the fridge. You ignore her. You don’t want to eat right now. You go upstairs, into the bubble that is your room. You and Asriel’s room. You make your way to your empty bed in the empty side of the room, curl up against your empty stomach. It doesn’t even hurt right now. You squeeze shut your empty eyes.