I... plowed the fields. The ground is heavy, cold, and full of stones. My hands are rough, my skin sunburned. Every morning I got up to feed the chickens and milk the cattle, every night I fell asleep on the straw with an honest tired body. There was no blood. No power. Just an ordinary life that left no mark. I died of age. No tragedy, no regret. Just death coming as it should, this... Just as boring as when I was a student, but, not so bad.
I attacked with various objects in hand, slaughtering or being slaughtered, winning or losing in the statistics of war. I became a looter, then a ruler, then a coup victim; I became a servant, a slave, a general, an inventor, betrayed, worshipped, buried alive, worshiped as a god, burned as a witch. Each life leaves a trail of new wounds that don't have time to heal before the next life picks up.
That voice... Not a language, not a tone. Like so many people trying to code through a cracked bone, or the whisper of a door crack. The shape... I can't explain it, I don't understand it. One thing, it's not the end.
*All the dialogue is under "not important", but I like writing Lovecraftian atmosphere.
"I heard the flesh speak."
"Not flesh. Layers. Layers that forgot how to be impermeable."
"Then shred it. Let the bones dance."
"What is dance? Concept or form?"
"Irrelevant. He's already chewed on numbers. He knew what a clock looked like before time was invented."
Sudden laughter. No, not laughter. It was... Not important, because I didn't understand it.
"He hears us. But he doesn't know which of us is 'us'."
"We are not us. We are the folds. We are knots that refuse to straighten."
"And him?"
"He is a window that thinks he is a wall."
"He tries to be a point, when he is a line cut by dimensions."
"Something dipped in a baby's mouth."
"Let him melt first. Let him understand that shapes are delusions brought up by the gravity of emotions."
"Has he regurgitated all his memories?"
"Not yet. There is a residue. The smell of iron. The taste of birth. The sound of amniotic fluid."
"Who named him?"
"No one gave it a name, it fell into a hole and the hole gave it a meaning."
"Funny."
"Very funny."
"Crack him."
"It's already cracked."
"Squeeze, squeeze until a false history comes out. Let me see."
"He's still here!"
"Let him see the last face that was never painted, remembered only by aging disgust."
"Give him the door."
"Not a door, a hole. And no bottom."
"Door! Door! Door! Door!!!"
"The root has reached up, it refuses to become soil."
"Soil is just the sky failing."
"The sky never fails, it just hides in the lungs of a fish."
"Then who stares at time from behind eyes that haven't grown?"
"No eyes, just a cavity that regrets ever being a hole."
"Ahh... So that's why it cries sound, not water."
"It's not sound, it's serrations. Sound is never born from anything other than the belly of a calendar."
"The clock ticks backwards. I like it when it feels salty."
"Shhh... listen. That was a heartbeat trying to disguise itself as singing."
"Chanting? It was a funeral. For an idea that hasn't been conceived yet."
"Don't make them laugh, laughter is a disease that rots from the center."
"The sixth world is already cracked. Who put it together with the universe's semen?"
"Not us. We only stitched the veins with even numbers."
"You still believe in numbers? I burned all the shapes. Now I'm counting using smell."
"Hahaha, smell! Smell is the first letter of immortality."
"Wrong. Eternity doesn't have an alphabet, only sounds that resemble forms of guilt."
"We must reply them. Wash them in unconsciousness."
"There is a hole in time, I can smell his breath."
"Inhale! Take a deep breath. Until your lungs grow back into a child."
"And he ate you, didn't he? Because that's the first law. Whoever understands will be eliminated."
"Hurry up! Speak of things that only the forgotten river can understand!"
"Yol-hazt... un'li-thur... Krekt'ma... Ugh."
"Hahaha! You still remember the first tongue!"
"No, it was just frozen dream vomit."
"That's how it should be."
"Break space. Bury time. Don't give him an exit."
"I've written this ending on the back of a blind bat that cries colors."
"Exactly. Then let everything rot amidst the formation."
....
How long have I been here?
The question is like grasping dry sand that can never really be grasped. Because time stops being time when there is no second, no breath, no motion. Just naked consciousness, with no body and no world to cling to. Weeks? Years? Thousands of star cycles? All of that lost its relevance.
It was as if I had already seen everything. Not life, but the fragments behind life; I had witnessed the naked form of thought before it formed language, before it was given a name. I had witnessed emotions being born and dying, not through human bodies, but in their raw form: hunger that didn't need food, love that didn't know its subject, fear that couldn't be explained.
I've lived as someone else, too many times. Already died under various names. Have believed in different gods, hated different skies, touched faces I never really touched. But everything felt like it belonged to me. So, if memory is the basis of identity, and I have thousands that I can't tell real from fake... Who am I? Maybe the question isn't: "Who am I?", but "What will I choose?".
I started to long for something real: pain, touch, the heaviness of gravity, the time that moves slowly when you wait, the smell of rotten food, the dust in your throat; anything... That proves that I exist in the world, and the world exists. But the more I remember, the more everything seems like a nightmare that has been replayed too many times.