School..." The word came out like a curse.
"I endured the worst kinds of torture. Not just physical—that was easy. The beating? You can take it. But the psychological..."
His face twisted with painful memories.
"They did things to me... things that made me think of death every day. *Every day.* The beatings, the insults, the isolation, the mockery, the humiliation..."
His voice became a choked whisper:
"Drinking piss... filthy piss in a plastic cup... while they laughed. They laughed."
He squeezed his eyes shut, as if trying to force the memory out.
"Why? Why me? I don't remember doing anything to deserve it. I never hurt anyone. I wasn't a troublemaker. I was just... existing."
He opened his eyes, tears now flowing down his dirty cheeks.
"There is no real reason why I was the trash. I was the victim. I... was the one who deserved all of it."
"Home..." His voice filled with a deeper bitterness. "Home wasn't any better."
He wiped his tears with the back of his hand, leaving grimy streaks on his face.
"My family... they didn't really have any hopes for me. Average grades. No talents. No bright future. Of course they didn't hate me for it, but..."
He stopped, the words hurting more than any blow.
"They didn't love me either. Not like they loved my brother. My more talented brother. My smarter brother. My more... handsome brother."
He laughed a bitter laugh.
"Yeah, even my looks were uglier than my brother's. Even that wasn't in my hands. God decided to make me ugly too. Why? Because he loves me?"
His voice grew quieter, but more pained:
"My father... he still treated me as his son. He tried. He really tried. But my mother..."
He stopped, taking a shuddering breath.
"My mother didn't even try to hide her greater love for my brother. She was always saying: 'Your brother is the future. Your brother is the hope. Your brother, your brother, your brother...'"
He closed his eyes.
"And me? I was... the mistake. The failure. The living reminder that life isn't always what we want."
"Was I jealous? Yes. Desperately. But I didn't hate them. Not then. I just wished... I was like them. That I was good enough for them to love."
A long silence. Too long. He was breathing with difficulty, as if the next memory was physically choking him.
"But that... that changed. Just a few months ago."
His voice became dead, flat, emotionless—as if reading a medical report.
"I was the one who discovered it."
"I came home... and I started hearing sounds. Sounds of moaning... disgusting sounds. Wet. Animalistic."
"It was weird because my parents weren't really the loud type in... in the physical relationship."
"But then..." His voice began to tremble again. "I heard *his* voice..."
He stopped, his face twisting with unbearable pain.
"He was screaming: 'Faster, you bitch!'"
The words came out as if burning him from the inside.
"I remember that moment more than any other. Time stopped. The blood froze in my veins. My heart stopped. It wasn't my father's voice. But it was a familiar voice. The voice of..."
He suddenly screamed, the sound muffled in his fist:
"*His* voice! The voice of that monster! The monster who made my school life hell! The monster who humiliated me, tortured me, mocked me! The monster..."
"I don't remember what happened after that. It's like my mind deleted the next moments to protect me. But... I found myself in the room."
His voice became a terrified whisper:
"And what I'd feared was true."
"My mother was there. On top of him. Moving. Moaning. Sleeping with... sleeping with the monster who ruined my life."
He started laughing—a hysterical, insane, broken laugh.
"And the worst part? The absolute worst part? She didn't even look scared. Or remorseful. She looked... annoyed. Annoyed that I interrupted their little session. Like I was a pesky child barging into an adult's room."
"After that... everything happened fast. Like dominoes."
"My mother didn't deny what happened to my father. She didn't even apologize. She just calmly asked for a divorce. She said... she said she didn't want the relationship to continue."
"My father... my father didn't take it. He tried. Tried to understand, to forgive, to keep going. But after one week..."
His voice shattered completely:
"He decided *he* was the guilty one. That he wasn't enough. That he'd failed as a husband. And he hanged himself... in his own room."
Silence. Thick silence. Then:
"I was the one who found him. He was... still swinging a little."
"The last thing I saw of my mother..." he said in a dead, empty voice. "She gave me thirty dollars. Thirty pieces of silver. She said: 'You're not welcome here anymore.'"
"And he was standing there. Behind her. His hands around her waist. Smiling. That devilish smile. The same smile he wore when torturing me in school. The same smile I saw when I opened the door that day."
"I left. What else was I going to do? I found a job as a dishwasher. The only job someone with no experience, no degree, with nothing can do."
"I've lived since that day in this wretched apartment. This grave." He looked around at the chaos, the mold, the filth.
"I think to myself every day. I talk to myself. To the walls. To the God who doesn't answer. So I don't go insane."
He stopped, then laughed a bitter laugh:
"Or maybe I went insane a while ago. Maybe I'm actually in a mental hospital. Maybe this is all a delusion. Maybe..."
He looked at the ceiling, at the mold patch that looked like a face.
"Maybe that would be more merciful."
He raised his hands toward the sky—or toward the leaking ceiling—in a mocking gesture of supplication.
"Then is this my fault?!" he screamed, his voice echoing off the damp walls. "Or is it God's fault?!"
Silence. No answer. As usual.
"It's his fault..." he whispered finally, his voice filled with a dark certainty. "Yes. It's his fault. Everything. Every moment of pain. Every humiliation. Every betrayal. Every failure."
His voice rose again:
"If he were just, if he were merciful, if he truly loved us—he wouldn't allow this. He wouldn't create this. He wouldn't... he wouldn't have created me."
He collapsed onto the bed, his face in the fetid pillow, his body shaking with silent sobs.
"And I... I hate him for it. I hate him with everything left in my soul. I hate him more than I hate myself."
In the silence that followed, in the damp darkness of this cursed room, there was only the sound of water dripping from the ceiling—drip… drip… drip—like a clock counting down to an end that never comes.
After that, he fell into a deep silence. He wasn't crying anymore—the tears had dried up long ago, or maybe there just wasn't enough water left in his desiccated body. He lay on the bed, eyes open, staring at the cracked ceiling, at the mold stains resembling maps of dead worlds.
Night crept through the cracks in the filthy curtain. Moonlight—that pale, sickly light filtered through the city's pollution—began to fill the room with a ghostly glow. It wasn't a light that brought hope; it only revealed how filthy everything was, how debased this tomb he called a room had become.
The sounds of the city were audible outside—distant cars, yelling from the street, a bottle shattering somewhere. Life continued out there, in the outside world. But here, in this room, time had stopped a long time ago.
The moonlight moved slowly across the room—an indifferent cosmic motion, unconcerned with the small human misery beneath it. The pale beam slid over the heaps of trash, over the rotting plates, over the empty bottles, until it finally reached the slanted desk in the corner.
There, amidst the chaos of scattered papers, unpaid bills, and empty medicine bottles, lay a shirt. A simple, dirty shirt, tossed carelessly, stained with unidentifiable blotches—sweat, food, maybe old tears.
But on the chest of the shirt, there was something—a number printed in simple, white lettering, almost invisible against the grime:
15
Just a number. No special meaning, no significance. Maybe it was a work shirt, maybe from an old school, maybe just a cheap shirt he'd bought from a thrift store. He couldn't remember.
But now the moonlight struck it, making the number glow strangely in the darkness—15—as if it were a sign, a symbol of something, as if it were…
Nothing. Just a number on a dirty shirt.
He turned his head slowly—a painful, heavy movement, as if his neck were made of lead—to look toward the desk. His bloodshot, swollen eyes, red from suppressed tears, focused on that glowing number in the moonlight.
15
"Fifteen…" he whispered, his voice rough, broken. "How old was I? Fifteen… when everything started to fall apart? Or fourteen? I don't remember…"
He didn't care anymore. Numbers, dates, moments—they had all merged into one solid mass of gray pain.
Then, something happened.
At first, he thought his eyes were deceiving him—it wouldn't be the first time. How many times had he seen shadows move in the corners? How many times had he heard sounds that weren't there? A shattered mind playing its cruel games.
But this… this was different.
The air in the room began to vibrate—a faint trembling, as if reality itself was rippling like a pond's surface after a stone is dropped. A light—not the pale moonlight, but another light, white, pure, impossible—began to seep from nowhere.
He sat up abruptly, his heart pounding fast—the first time he'd felt anything other than numbness in weeks.
"What…?"
The white light focused, condensed, began to take shape—a circle in the air, expanding slowly, pulsing with an energy he couldn't comprehend. It wasn't just light—it was something. It was a door.
A portal. A white portal. An impossible portal.
It opened in the middle of his rotting room, like a wound in the fabric of reality, a tear in the wall of existence. The light emanating from it was painfully pure—a purity that didn't belong to this place, to this room, to this wretched world.
He stood slowly, his body trembling, not believing what he was seeing. He took a step toward the portal, then another, as if in a dream—or a nightmare—he couldn't wake from.
The light was warm. He hadn't felt warmth since… he couldn't remember when. The room was always cold, damp, dead. But this light…
And suddenly, he understood.
Or thought he did.
A smile—not a smile of happiness, but a smile of pure despair, the smile of a man who has finally reached the end—spread across his dirty, exhausted, broken face.
"Ah…" he whispered, his voice trembling between laughter and tears. "Finally…"
Tears began to fall again, but this time they were different. They weren't tears of pain, but tears of… relief? Surrender? Acceptance?
"I'm dead," he whispered, stepping toward the light. "I must be dead. Finally."
He looked at the white portal, beautiful, impossible.
"Is this… Heaven?" His voice was full of bitter sarcasm, but also a desperate, broken hope. "After all that… after everything I said… you send me a door?"
He laughed—a mad, sad, choking laugh.
"I don't deserve Heaven. I know that. But…" He stretched his hand toward the light, his dirty fingers shaking. "But maybe… maybe death is enough. Maybe oblivion is enough. Maybe finally… I'll finally rest."
The light pulsed, stronger, brighter.
"Yes…" he whispered, his desperate smile widening. "Yes. Take me. Whatever you are. Whatever this is. Take me away from here."
He took another step, his bare foot on the filthy floor now touching the edge of the light.
Warmth. Real warmth. For the first time in…
"Thank you…" he whispered, his voice almost gone. "Thank you… for finally ending this…"
He looked back one last time—at the rotting room, at the filthy bed, at the desk littered with unpaid bills, at the shirt with the number 15 still glowing in the moonlight.
"Goodbye…" he whispered. "Goodbye, little hell."
Then he stepped into the portal.
The room was empty.
The white portal began to fade slowly, the light dimming, the warmth disappearing.
Within seconds, it vanished completely, as if it had never existed.
The room returned to its darkness, its dampness, its decay.
Only the pale moonlight struck the dirty shirt, the number 15 still glowing strangely in the dark.
And the roaches resumed their activity, moving among the trash, indifferent that the occupant of this tomb had disappeared.
Life—if you could call it that—went on.
But he… was no longer here.