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You are… a solitary person. A lot of things led you to be like that. Having a mom that you couldn’t get far enough away from, for one. And...well, people didn’t necessarily like you very much when you were still alive. Being raised completely alone on some creepy esoteric curriculum made that certain. Anyone you’ve talked to for more than a few minutes might call you...difficult. Oh, and you find everyone dreadfully ignorant.
You’ve had a lot of time to think about this since you died. How you were always alone and everyone seemed to hate you as much as you hated them. You find it hard to focus on anything else, only the fucked up teenage angst crammed into your compartmentalized mind.
You were 10 when your mom marked you with your first eye. It’s funny, the first one didn’t hurt as much as the second one because you didn’t really know what was happening. She sat on the hot summer kitchen tiles with you, and touched your back for what felt like hours. You hardly even registered the pain because you were so damned touch starved. But when you went to the bathroom that night you saw it, the scattered moles on your back intruded on by a large, open eye, straight in the middle of your back. And you’ve felt the eye on your back every day since.
It was many years before it was your eye, too. When suddenly, each of the eyes on your body that had come to watch you--to feed off of your encounters with fear and misery--became one of your very own to look through. Now you saw others pain, and no one looked at your own, especially not you. Their pain fed the eye. Fed you .
But that’s what your mother wanted. And you’d be damned to give that woman anything she wanted.
But Gertrude… You suppose it wasn’t her fault. The whole cancer thing. But she did choose to leave, and it was her fault that you died alone.
In the end, you still refused to do the thing your mother wanted. You knew the eye was waiting for you--it had been watching you your whole life. Waiting for the day you gave yourself to it, completely. As you saw your life fading, you gave the eye the worst pain you’d ever endure, and then gave nothing more.
You knew Gertrude was a sentimental old bag. Putting you into that book… you never got a chance to tell her how much it hurt. The pain it caused you to constantly be bound to something like The End when all you wanted to do was die and stop thinking about fear. All the pain of your divorce from blissful eternity, shot into a flap of your skin…
It’s almost like Gertrude knew which eye had seen the most of you, because when it was time, she slowly and precisely began peeling a large piece of skin from the center of your back.
Now...you just want to be dead, gone, and burned--burying wouldn’t do it. You had to be destroyed. And you had to depend on some nitwit doing it for you, it seemed.
Jon looked sincere enough when he ripped your page out of the book. He touched your dried, decimated skin, and you could almost feel it. It hurt Jon though. And the part of yourself that you hate loved to feel that again, the thrill of watching living agony.
You talked to him for longer than you planned to. You let him compel you gently because you liked to see the head of this toddler fill with information until he looked like he could almost stand on his own. Most embarrassing, you even asked him at the end of all of it to call you Gerry . Maybe you were just as sentimental as old Gerry herself. But your interest certainly didn’t extend beyond the hope of your approaching second death.
Your last dead moments are spent trolling in the despair of your youth, trying to eek out enough misery to end the hankering of an ever present eye, one that followed you beyond where you thought it could. But of course It was still watching you--you were a book for God’s sake.