Chapter 1

All the reasons don't amount to shit.

Why I was left here.

Why I was forsaken.

Why god deemed me just subhuman enough to be forgotten.

None of that means a fucking thing.

What does though, is that I'm here. What matters is the product of reasonings I'll never understand. And that's exactly what I plan to accept...
One of these days.


This day though, this day wasn't it. I knelt in front of my mother's tombstone- an unimpressive display of craftsmanship, small, rounded, name and date. No implication of a life beyond her name. No “loving mother” or “dutiful wife” or “super duper daughter” or any of that bullshit. My father's was just as bleak. Names and dates on stones as cold as the hands that crafted them. I studied them then as I had a thousand times before, and a thousand since.

The sun was disappearing behind a hill littered with more, well, “furnished” stones, scattered chaotically across the whole of it. Some were shaded by the umbrage of large, bowing trees standing firmly as guardians among the ancient corpses, whose stories were long forgotten- buried with the relatives who had laughed alongside them, their names symbolic only of a reference to a two-dimensional black and white face that nobody alive today would recognize in flesh.

I could already tell that it was going to be a long, rough day. I sighed, tracing my mother's name with my index finger, shuddering at the coldness of it. I was wrenched back to a day when a five-year-old me touched her hand for the last time, right before I was shooed away so that the lid could close over her. Her cold death hands somehow solidified the fact that this moment was going to last the rest of my life. The perfect stillness of a face that once sung me lullabies and taught me the alphabet, the light brown hair that became a venue of my personal identity (whether I kept it or not is a different story) became a place I retreated to when there was nowhere to go, a pit I dug gradually throughout the course of my eternity alone. The memory of that perfect stillness became, over the years, my epicenter of self-pity, a stumbling-block in the way of my emotional liberation. My mother, sleeping in a shiny glazed box right beside my father, who I barely remember glancing at. It was only my lullaby angel, my gentle disciplinarian, my life-raft in a world she had deliberately tethered me to from wherever I happened to be before I became a being. It had been my mother who I watched intently for any sign of movement, of life (even though then I had no real concept of the term). A gentle, downy man with a long beard and kind eyes warned me tactfully that there would be none.

I remember this man better than I remember my father. I remember how his eyes glittered with unshed tears as he withdrew into himself, shaking his head slowly, as he appeared to contemplate some great mystery that everybody but myself seemed to be in on. If I had known then how in the dark everyone is about death, I'm sure that I would have felt very adult.

That night I stayed in a strange woman's house with nothing but a stuffed puppy I called Tanner. The house smelled strongly of perfume and potpourri. I slept on a lumpy tan couch decorated with realistic, albeit undefinable, maroon flowers. In the morning, the woman tried to feed me oatmeal, but I refused it with hysterics, and not long after that, Lady Ebony came and took me away to a strange new place full of strange new people who asked me a lot of questions and wanted to play with Tanner. I wouldn't let them.

I jumped around from home to home to stay briefly with women who had names like Beth and Marcy who had husbands with names like Bill or Dave. Some of them had dogs with names like Ruffles or Max, and others had children with names like Melanie or Stephen. All of them tried to feed me goddamn oatmeal. All of them sent me back with Lady Ebony. All of them said good-bye. And more importantly, all of them meant it.