I am living.
Though, living was quite a strange thing.
Not a day passed where I didn’t question if I would make it to the next.
Not a single day since before I could even remember.
It was as if everything that I lived through, all that I lived for, heck, all that i was or ever would be, was some sort of sick, twisted game that some almighty gods were playing. I was only a pawn for them to move about as they please. One space at a time, blindly moving forward.
Everyone says that these gods are omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Some might say that they might even be all caring, but they sure as heck didn’t care at all what life was like down here. If I were gone tomorrow, what would they care. They could just make another human in a heartbeat. They could just replace one heartbeat with another.
A heartbeat. Heh… a heart is such a funny thing.
I remember when the sound of it used to be comforting to me. But now, my own was like a terrible reminder of what happened to me. Any other was a terrible reminder of what could happen to me.
I am living...
It was like everything that I’ve known since I was just a child was some sort of mirage, waiting to throw me into the harsh world that is now my life. Into the harsh truth that is my reality. Into the dark times that are what I’ve become.
To think that in four short weeks, I’ll be sixteen. I’ll finally be of age to…
Well, none of that really matters anymore.
At least not since the incident.
To make matters even worse, all of this was just a simple mistake from a time before I had any power to make it right. A time before I could do anything about it. My nurse, let’s call her Brooke, forgot to give me my bracelet.
Was her name Brooke? I honestly don’t know, nor do i really care. I sure hope it was, though.
Brooke, the ruiner of lives. Brooke the awful. Brooke who broke my heart. Brooke the twisted. Vile Brooke. Brooke with the bad hair. Brooke the annihilator. Brooke the old, crusty, walnut toothpaste with a mole on her back.
Brooke.
I hope she rots in hell for what she did to me.
Now, I’m a reject.
In this world full of extraordinary people, those people who were rejected by societal standards, their parents or by the government lose their wristbands and are left to fend for themselves on the streets.
There was only one problem with living on the streets. Any humans spotted on the streets after dark without their wristband were hunted down and disintegrated by the patrollers. Patrollers were huge, ugly, one wheeled cars that could instantly dematerialise anything that dared to get in their way. Quite nasty and barbaric, if you ask me.
I wonder if Brooke still thinks of me.
All she had to do was take an extra two seconds of her time in order to remember that a particular baby (me) needed to have a wristband placed on her.
But because she had to be so incompetent for those few vital seconds of my life, here I am now, huddled in a box, shivering my butt off just so that the patrollers wouldn’t find me on their nightly hunts.
I am living...
I wonder if Brooke knows what she did to me.
You’d think that after two years of this, things would get easier. You’d think that I’d adopt some sort of pattern; a routine that would would life just… a little bit more bearable.
But a minute passes by.
Then two then three. Five minutes pass and my stomach is still low on fuel. Ten minutes pass and I’m still crying, wondering who could ever wish a life like this on me. Fifteen minutes pass and I still don’t know if I’ll be able to last any longer to do it all again.
I am living…
But am I alive?
I wonder if Brooke still cares about me…
I wonder if anyone does.
The one thing that I’ve learnt over the past few years is that the day keep getting longer and longer until one day i just… can’t.