The curse continues! Welcome readers, to perhaps the darkest chapter of the story. A journey to the Abyss, into which I stared just a little too long. A chain of events that changed my life forever, for worse…or better? Hard to judge, but after all, I am still here to tell the tale.
Firstly it is important to set the stage. The following events occurred somewhere about two-thirds of the way through the first Tragedy. A summer about two years into the three-or-so year arc. This was the point at which the pain I was living with became unbearable. I was faced with a desperation, a desire only to escape the suffering. I was wiling to try anything.
I became obsessed with a question to which I did not have a clear answer. Is this the only one I can love? Can I find another? Am I capable of moving on? There was only one way to find out. I searched my memories and feelings for any possibility. I found one.
A couple of years previous, I had attended a kind of big church event, at a time when I was too naive to know better about religion. In any case, I had somehow met a girl and gotten her phone number. I had not done much with said number, I had called and talked with her but only in a casual friendly way. After I had met T1 not too long after the event, I didn’t give this girl much thought. Until now. I occurred to me that I had liked her, and wondered if she would remember me.
A phone call later I knew she did. I got myself invited over to hang out. A few more times spent together and I had learned she was just recently single. After a movie one night I worked up the courage to ask if she would like to go out with me. She was hesitant but did say yes, and that was good enough for me. For the first time in a long time, I felt hopeful, almost happy even. I let myself feel more for her, caution thrown to the wind. I found that the seed of love already existed inside of me somehow, it just needed to be watered, so to speak. I found myself loving again, and found it to be unique and distinct from the love I had felt before. I had my answer to the question, a triumphant yes.
This respite however was short lived. Inside of two weeks I get an email from the girl. She claimed that she wasn’t over her previous boyfriend, and was changing her mind about me. There had been no time for a real chance to show her how I felt. It was over before it had even begun.
Anguish. Despair. Rejected again. I had been such a fool to trust so quickly, to let myself feel. Overwhelming hatred of self. Anger directed inwards. Agony beyond my wildest nightmares. I was reduced to nothing. I surrendered to this, I was ready to give up. On everything. I only wanted it to end. I longed for death, this life was too awful to continue. I lay almost catatonic, waiting until I had to energy to end myself. I knew without hesitation, this is the bottom of the spiral. I have slid all the way down and reached the black. And yet I smashed through it like thin ice, finding only an infinite darkness below. Met with the horror of it, the darkness became my world, and the light above shrank to nothing.
What came to pass next I must confess, I do not have a clear memory of. What I do remember is the torture surged to a sharp peak, followed by the indescribable sensation of breaking like a pane of glass. I was met with a curious numbness, a silence, no, a quite literal nothing. I was lost somehow and knew not the way out. The next bit is hard to explain. It was as though a hand reached out from somewhere, and having no alternative, I reached out with my own. A pulling sensation, outward, as though I were inside out and were folding back into shape. And then I ‘saw’ who the hand belonged to.
It was me. No, another me. Like a reflection in my mind. It looked at me with a curious expression and I observed it with equal wonder. It spoke. I don’t remember what he said exactly, but the point was that he said things I wasn’t thinking, moving independently on the inside. We conversed, trying to comprehend what this was, understand ourselves. We didn’t have a complete picture then, but the logic of it began to make sense in time, after a fashion.
The darkness inside me, the pain of my life, had been building for years. I had needed to bottle it up inside me, hiding my true feelings in order to function in the world. This new pain, so vast in size, added to what was already there, was too much, a critical mass. At this point it imploded on itself, shattering my mind in the process. As a kind of survival mechanism, my mind put the pieces back together, but not all in one place. Where the black tumor had been before, now a mind lived, built around a heart born of darkness.
I must segue briefly to put this another way. I identify as having Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID), more commonly known as Multiple (or Split) Personalities. No psych doctor has diagnosed this, but I don’t need a shrink telling me what I already know to be fact. He exists. I have lived with this condition since my 17th year, and he has been around longer now than the time previous. Because of him, I consider myself to be mentally ill. Accepting my apparent insanity has made it easier to live with and adapt.
Back to the past, I recognized that this new state of being was necessary and permanent. This being inside of me was intelligent, but innocent in a way, and undoubtedly naive. This made the next events that much worse.
I gave him more or less free reign early on, letting him take over and experience life. But within a week of his creation, he saw her, T2, online and got a message from her. She complained about being “horny”. This got his attention, and he volunteered himself to oblige her. She was ok with this, and we went over to her house. No parent home, they frolicked and made the most of it. A good time, apparently, was had. Afterward we went home and some glimmer of hope came about that she might at least be interested in dating him. Whatever works.
Only a day later she says online she’s not attracted to us anymore. A most puzzling turn of events to be sure. His reaction differed greatly from mine, he was enraged, a fury I had never seen before. It wasn’t enough that she had rejected me. She had used us. What a cruel joke this had become. He vowed to me he would have “justice” for this slight, just another way of saying revenge. He only felt so strongly about it because somehow in his creation, he had inherited the love I had felt for her. He had freed me of the burden, only to carry it himself. This would only complicate his desires.
These early events set the tone for his development, feeding his darkness, and maturing him as a conscious being into something a far cry from normality.
He has never had a proper name, I only call him Shadow, since that is what I see him as, my dark tenant. He is not human in any recognizable sense. Calling him “evil” would be an oversimplification though. An evil person is “immoral”, having bad morals. Shadow is almost completely amoral, he simply doesn’t have any. This is part of the reason that not everything he has done while in control of the body has been bad. He has even helped others, though only to serve his own ends. He does not have “friends”, whoever he associates with are those he finds useful in some way, either for some specific purpose, or merely for entertainment. He’s always been a hedonist, and something of a sadist, delighting in the pain of others. These diversions however, are unrelated to his ultimate goals.
One of these goals is her. Nearly two decades later he still hungers for vengeance. And yet she is the only thing he has ever loved, that love being the only human trait he has. How does he reconcile his love and his hate do you ask? Simply, he says. His plan is to take her and own her, like a possession. He would rip her away from whatever life she has without hesitation or remorse. He would then, by whatever means available to him, endeavor to change her, to remold her in his desired image, to build his ideal counterpart. This would be his justice upon her, by taking away her freedom (that he says she misused) and forcing her to atone for the mistake of creating him. His reasoning is that his existence is painful and unnecessary, and he blames her for creating him.
In a way, I don’t blame him for wanting this. I remember the pain of that time and to be honest, I think he has a point. It has never been possible to bring the fullness of the plan to action, much of what he would need isn’t available to him. But if it were possible, and he could do as he wishes, I can’t say I would stop him.
Nevertheless, I’m the host here, and I run the show in this body. He respects my position, and refrains from taking actions that would endanger our well being, that being in his own best interests. It’s a workable arrangement, though he does grow restless these days; he seldom gets to ‘drive’ anymore, he just sleeps and waits. I used to give him friday nights to go out and have his way, it seemed only fair, without him, I would be dead today.
This is her legacy. I live with this flavor of madness because of her youthful indiscretions. She’s a different woman now, I’m sure. Not even the same girl we loved. But if my Shadow ever found the means, that would not save her from him.
I am a cage for a monster.
And by the way…
…the monster can still speak.
Expect to hear from him, dear readers. He is always with me.
-SR
The Riddle of the Spiral 