You don’t understand what they did to you until you try to leave. How arbitrary violence abstracted the day into fearful ritual; how pain was made normal so it would feel deserved; how language was crippled to make the cage seem smaller; how only silence was spared. These things only become clear later.

It’s weird being hated for no reason. Obvious violence enjoys all the usual cruelties, but violence of no clear origin is an infection of being – recast a mind in terms of the very thing it can’t understand, and that mind will lose the ability to trust itself, will become literate only in the language of its own abuse. The damnation here is masterful – make the signs of suffering grotesque enough, and the target stops appearing sympathetic to the people around them. They stop appearing sympathetic to themselves.

And what about the first time you find yourself looking back at a pair of guileless eyes, eh? Heh, heh, well, that’s a grim one, too. Here you are, trying to exist without living, trying to approximate an emotion by the tracing the edges of its negative space, and shit’s getting weirder by the second. Trying to find a single human word when you’ve never been given a human vocabulary is as crazy-making as it gets. But what’re you supposed to do? How’re you supposed to express love without actually feeling it?

If you can’t even say hello properly, what else are you doing wrong?

Are you even smiling right?

Time goes by, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The whole thing never stops feeling wrong, but you get used to it. You already know where this is going – your intellect was never kneecapped, remember, just the other stuff – so now it’s just a matter of waiting until you’ve drifted far enough from where you could have been that you can see the entire other life as its own living body, a home of absent space.

When everything you were positive was going to come after “hey” is given to someone else the only company you have left will be the things that never happened. A face willfully misremembered, its better angles always turned away; voices in a wavering pitch; lies stubborn enough to send proper time the long way around; anachronisms so hungry to be seen they’ll settle for being mocked. Misery, with a purpose – if you can define every missing piece in terms of another then you’ve made the problem deliberately unsolvable. So you’ll never be done with it. So you will never have to watch it end. So you’ll never have to admit that it’s gone.