Work Text:
[Tape recorder clicks]
Statement of Casey deVere, regarding how he... wound up this way.
Statement recorded directly from source, October 16th, 2017.
Statement begins.
Being alone and being lonely are different things, you know. I know that often they are seen as one in the same, however... they are most definitely not. Alone is simply a state of being, something you can be whenever you feel the need to. It's not inherently negative. But lonely... that is an emotion, something you feel in your bones. It is not simply isolation that makes one feel lonely, either. You can be lonely in a crowd of people, lonely when you are the most well known person on the planet, it does not matter. What matters is how feeling lonely affects you.
See, I suppose technically, that's what I use to feed. It's not like I enjoy it, quite the contrary. I- I didn't even really want to be this way. It's not like I was even intentionally raised to become who I am now. It was simply a result of trauma.
See, when my parents got divorced, when I was only a five-year-old, my father... well, everything seemed fine at first. He was a bit frazzled, and quite sad about the divorce, as anyone would be. I think both my parents were rather upset by it, despite my mother making the choice. And then he met my stepmother. She was a... well, she was a stubborn women, to say it nicely. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with being stubborn, but she had a specific idea for how I should be raised, and it... wasn't beneficial to me, and she... well, she kept doing what she believed was the right thing despite my clear lack of receptiveness to it. See, as a little kid, I was what you could call a problem child. I was chaotic and overemotional and would fight kids over nothing. I vaguely remember biting a girl one time, actually, so I think that gives you an idea of what I was like. My stepmom, being a high school teacher, thought she knew what was best for me, and apparently, to her, what was best for me was verbal abuse. My father did nothing to stop it, and in fact he encouraged it. He would hit me and call me useless and worse. I was constantly accused of heinous actions I had been too young to have done, and it made me absolutely miserable.
One particular incident at age 12 is what broke me. My father and I had been fighting for hours, and it culminated in him grabbing me by the throat and dragging me to my room. I sat in my room, feeling completely alone and lonely. My breath was ragged and my neck ached. I couldn't tell anyone what happened, of course I couldn't. If I did they'd think I was a liar, for that was what my father and stepmom portrayed me as. That's what I thought at the time, at least. He'd locked the door from the outside, trapping me in my tiny room until he deemed it appropriate for me to leave. I remember vividly that I decided to go to bed, hoping I wouldn't wake up.
I did wake up eventually, of course. I wouldn't be here if I didn't. But I awoke somewhere else. I thought I did, at least. Somewhere wrong. It was somewhere akin to one of those kiddie play areas at American malls. They're filled with soft plastic and rubber things for children to climb on and slide down. I remember there being a log that children could climb through, some stumps, and a stone bridge, all appropriately children-sized. Oddly, I was completely alone. I was... unsettled, but sat down on one of the stumps regardless. And I waited.
For what felt like years I waited in the strange kiddie play area, feeling more and more odd as I waited for something to happen. And then I awoke.
As it turns out, I had suffocated nearly to death. Turns out my father crushed my windpipe when he had been dragging me up the stairs, and that plus my head in the pillows of my bed suffocated me. My father had found me in the morning and called the ambulance, and although I was declared dead on the scene, I awoke alone in the morgue. Apparently it gave quite the shock to the mortician. Upon further examination, my windpipe seemed to have... repaired itself, which baffled everyone.
I think I made a choice in the time in which I sat in that children's playroom. I think I chose to serve it. The Lonely. I don't always know if it's just the Lonely, though. I wonder sometimes if there's something else there, something more... surreal. The Spiral, maybe. Perhaps it was all the gaslighting and lies I experienced, it grew interested in my existence. I don't know, and honestly I don't care to find out, really.
Something I wish I could do, though, is live life normally. I was robbed of that, I think. I could've lived life normally had I not been given the cards I had. I watch people live their lives, raise their families, and all I feel is jealousy. If for whatever reason I deem a member of the family... a good fit, for the Lonely, I snatch them up. Put them in my world. The empty, isolating halls of an abandoned shopping mall, perhaps. Or maybe a water park, both functional and filthy, and completely empty. I don't take pleasure in it. Honestly, I don't like it. It makes me sad. Most of the time I want them to succeed. They don't, mostly. It's a shame.
I am alone. I'll always be alone. But I am not lonely.
Statement ends.