Page 526 of Coal Hearts

And I did the only thing I could.

I boxed up those days.

I deleted all those nights.

I removed myself from my brothers and sisters in the hope I wouldn’t infect them too...

Exhaling heavily, I glanced up and noticed my beer was gone.

Dusk had fallen.

Another night was coming for me.

Where the hell is Ily?

Every afternoon, she visited Peter and the jewels, and I was grateful.

Grateful for the space to suffer the overwhelming despair and misery that only grew worse.

I couldn’t breathe anymore.

Couldn’t exist without fighting, fighting, always goddamn fighting my true nature whenever she was around.

All those black, awful urges that’d been instilled inside me when I was a kid. All those diabolical traits that I’d smothered and deleted, giving myself amnesia where I forgot the siblings I’d lived with, all so I didn’t have to remember what happened in that room with our mothers.

Tearing my hands through my hair, I trembled.

That amnesia was cracking.

The more the darkness claimed me, the faster my past came back.

It’d been two weeks since Victor left, and I remembered something new every day. The manuscript had become a channelling medium. Snippets of moments when I’d spied my older brother as I was dragged to witness yet another rape now haunted me in my sleep.

I didn’t want to remember.

I didn’t want to be this way.

I didn’t want to lie awake in the dark, gagging on the same darkness inside me.

One night last week, I’d dreamed of bathing in blood. The silky slippery sensation of red, red, red. Instead of waking up and rushing to the bathroom to heave my rotten guts up, I’d been rock fucking hard and moments away from rolling Ily onto her stomach and taking her.

Shit...I’d been close.

So damn close to letting out all the pressuring filth inside me.

I fucking hated myself.

I loathed every thought in my head.

I might’ve been bred by a monster and had him pour his curse into me one day at a time, but I didn’t want it.

I thought I did after playing Ruby Tears.

I thought I could trample on other people’s lives so I could finally be free, but the truth was?

Fuck, the truth was I’d had it right the night I’d tried to end it.

The scar on my leg taunted me to try again.