???- memory
People like to imagine the world as enormous. Vast cities. Endless skies. Infinite choices. They say chaos is overwhelming, that madness is loud.
They are wrong.
The world is small.
Small enough to fit inside a kitchen.
Small enough to exist between two people sitting across from each other at a table, pretending tomorrow is guaranteed.
That was my world.
A house with walls thin enough to hear the neighbors argue. A door that stuck when it rained. A woman who laughed at jokes that weren't funny because she wanted me to feel clever. I believed in routines. Morning light. Evening silence. The idea that if I stayed careful, if I stayed kind, the universe would return the favor.
That belief was my first mistake.
My name mattered back then. It had weight. It fit inside mouths without effort. It belonged to someone who believed identity was permanent. I signed it on papers. I whispered it when I was afraid. I thought names were anchors.
They aren't.
Names are masks people agree not to question.
I don't remember the exact moment the mask cracked. That's the thing about memory: it edits itself to be survivable. People insist on origins, on a single moment where everything went wrong. They want a cause they can point to, a lesson they can extract.
There wasn't one.
There was pressure.
Pressure builds quietly. It seeps into conversations. It hides in polite smiles and overdue bills and promises that sound thinner every time they're repeated. I watched people I admired compromise themselves one excuse at a time. I watched cruelty disguise itself as responsibility. I watched goodness become inconvenient.
The line between right and wrong didn't vanish.
It dissolved.
And when it was gone, no one admitted they noticed.
They talk about the fall like it was a baptism. Like something sacred happened in that moment. As if pain itself can create meaning. That's romantic nonsense. Pain doesn't teach. It reveals.
It revealed that everything I believed in was conditional.
That love could be used as leverage.
That fairness was a story told to keep people compliant.
That sanity was a social contract enforced by fear.
When I came back up, people expected screams. They expected rage. They expected grief.
What they got was laughter.
Laughter isn't joy. It's release. It's the sound of a mind snapping into a shape that finally fits. When I laughed, it wasn't because something was funny. It was because everything made sense for the first time.
I had been trying to be normal in a world that punishes it.
I stopped trying.
They like to catalogue what happened to me after that. Injuries. Arrests. Deaths that didn't stick. They turn suffering into statistics and call it justice. My body became a map of other people's certainty. Proof that order was being enforced.
But pain is repetitive.
It gets boring.
What interested me was how people reacted.
Heroes are fascinating creatures. They hurt you and call it mercy. They break you and insist it's necessary. They cling to their rules like drowning men clutching anchors, terrified that without them they'll float away and discover they're no different from the rest of us.
Especially him.
The Bat doesn't understand why I smile at him. He thinks it's mockery. It isn't. It's recognition. He's standing on the same edge I fell from, staring down, pretending gravity doesn't apply to him.
He thinks he's proof that one bad day doesn't matter.
He's wrong.
He's proof that it never ends.
I learned something important watching him. Watching all of them. People don't fear death. They fear meaninglessness. They fear that suffering doesn't add up to anything. That there's no grand balance sheet keeping score.
That's why loss hurts more than pain.
I loved once. Truly. That's the part they don't like to include in their stories. Love complicates the narrative. It suggests that I wasn't born broken. That I chose this. That scares them.
Love was my control group.
It showed me what the world takes first.
After that, everything else was research.
I watched how far someone could be pushed before they abandoned their principles. I watched how quickly the public forgave monsters if they wore the right symbols. I watched how easily pain became entertainment when it happened to someone people were told not to empathize with.
I didn't destroy hope.
I audited it.
Memory is unreliable now. Scenes blur. Faces shift. Events repeat themselves with different endings. Sometimes I remember dying. Sometimes I remember being reborn. Sometimes I remember nothing at all.
But the laughter stays.
It echoes when things get quiet. It fills the gaps where fear used to live. It reminds me that identity is a story we tell ourselves until it collapses under scrutiny.
I am not chaos.
Chaos is lazy.
This is curation.
This is demonstration.
This is holding up a mirror so clear people hate their reflections.
They call me insane because it's easier than admitting I'm honest. Honesty without restraint terrifies them. A world without comforting lies collapses overnight.
So I give them jokes instead.
This isn't a confession. Confessions ask for forgiveness. I don't want it. This isn't a warning either. Warnings assume people want to change.
This is a record.
A memory, fragmented and laughing, stitched together from moments people wish they could forget. Mine included.
And what comes next?
That's not fate.
That's not destiny.
That's curiosity.
And curiosity, as it turns out, is the most dangerous thing of all.
HAHA…
HAHAHAHA~