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My friends are gone. One stupid mistake. Gone. I can’t let that happen again. I have to get stronger.
Cold, cold. The world here rejects life. And yet life is what I’m here for, what I need.
I saw a glimpse of it. My hand, my skin, my face. Rolled away and sent to somewhere, never to be seen again.
I see them now. My hand, my...paint. A face stares back in the mirror. They showed me her likeness before but now she stares back and mimics me. Mocks me?
That girl I was sweet on rejects me now. But now I know that it wasn’t meant to be.
Every morning, she looks back at me from the bathroom mirror. I don’t need to be here anymore. Why am I here?
Breakfast, tea. Smells beautiful. Tastes the same. Relief washes over me.
The wilds are green, lush. The air is cool, the sun is warm, the dust of dirt still wafts to my senses. I don’t sneeze, though. That’s the weird part.
Look down the scope, find the mark, take a breath. I pause. No air comes into my lungs. Nothing moves, only my mouth. That’s the weird part. Pull the trigger, target down.
He looks at me and I understand everything and nothing at all. Our minds meet somewhere in the space between us. Everything is wrong. Everything is right? That’s the weird part. But I’m happy that it’s this way.
A child holds my hand. It’s warm and soft. So glad that I can feel it. So glad.
Arm is missing, pain shoots through me but stops. I stop it. I can stop that. That’s the weird part. That’s the good part. I can stay quiet, I can run on low power. I can shut off the lights in my eyes.
There is number by my name. Sometimes when I wake up, it changes. I don’t know why or when it changed, but I know my name. And it keeps changing. It’s ok. He tells me it’s ok and I believe him. I believe him.
A photograph with all of us in it. She looks back at me. No. I look back at me. I am her. She is me. I am me.
Building crashing down. It happened. I’m done. We fought but we weren’t enough. The end, the end. I raise my golden gun to the sky one last time, fire wraps around me. I call to my Light and it answers, it pushes through my circuits. One shot. Two shot. Six shots later I fall. My leg is somewhere behind me. No pain.
The barstool creaks under me. I order an entire bottle. Sadness grips my heart but I don’t remember why. I feel old today, there’s some odd ache in my joints. My Ghost says that there’s nothing wrong with me, at least physically. Might be the human part of me, I say. He doesn’t understand. I smile and drink down the bitter liquid. Always been a sneaking suspicion, the human thing. Being human at one point. That’s the weird part, isn’t it?