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One day, you will meet a boy. A child in a dirty oversized T-shirt, crouched in the dust behind a market stall, hurriedly picking up stolen change that fell out of the hole in his pocket. You will have to be very careful not to startle him when you kneel to help. His first instinct will be to run, but he won’t. Despite everything screaming in him to ditch the coin and run away, he will believe you when you stretch out your palm and say it’s okay. You have such a way with children, even though you never were one.
It will be hard at first, but you will manage. It was always easier for you to take care of someone rather than yourself. Anyone but yourself. You used to go for days without food and weeks without shelter, but you will always make sure to keep the child fed and warm. And, accidentally, you will be fed and warm as well.
You will teach him everything you know. To read, to write — although you will find out you aren’t particularly good at that, so you will have to teach yourself along the way, will even relearn your forgotten first language, because it will seem so important all of a sudden, to speak it with a kid who looks so much like you. You will teach him to cook, to take care of himself, to survive in the hostile world.
And then he will ask you to teach him to shoot.
You will. But you will never, under any circumstances, teach him how to kill. After you explain the anatomy of a gun, you will look him very seriously in the eyes and make him promise to never aim that gun at anyone’s chest, or head, or anything that isn’t a limb. He will nod gravely. And then, because you two are so alike, he will ask, if dick counts as a limb. You will laugh and say that if guy’s a total dick, it does.
In a heartfelt montage, he will grow up so fast, but not like you did. You wouldn’t allow it. You will make sure this kid knows only love and respect from you, because — by God you struggle to believe in — you have so much to give. People will take you for father and son, then for brothers, then for twins. One day, when your eyes meet at the same level, you won’t be able to shake the feeling of looking in the mirror. Then the other you will smile and say he wants to show you something.
He will put his palm where your heart is, and you will mirror the gesture, not expecting anything to happen, until your heartbeats fall into sync and suddenly, you will see yourself through your other self’s eyes: projected onto your retina, every memory you have made, every caring moment vivid and clear and bright and full of colour, will outshine your bloody miserable past — not enough to erase it, but just enough to break the chains you got so used to. Freed, you will take in a breath with your whole chest for the first time and marvel at the weightlessness of it. Only it will be cut short by a sob, then another one, and so many to come, because you will crumble to the dirt and weep. It will be alright. It will turn out that this have always been what you needed, and, tears streaming down your face, you will find that no religious dogma, no pursuit of some higher meaning could lead you where you led yourself.
Picking yourself up, you will smile devilishly, because you will learn that there was never much of a difference between feather and scale, and you will embrace yourself and clap yourself on the back and say you son of a bitch, what took you so long, and you will become your own truth.
But you haven’t met him yet. Sometimes I’m not sure you ever will, because “cry” sounds too much like “die” to you.
You think he’s dead, because you never were a child. But he’s right there, huddled in a foetal position in place of your heart, a small boy turned red with all the blood you spill, and with every new wave of violence he cries out and rattles your ribcage. You got so good at pretending to be deaf. You honed this art back when they would put you in a cage when you cried and punished you for weakness, and then gave you a name and a gun to match so you could keep punishing yourself. You got so good at that too.
This is why you can’t cry. This is why, sometimes, when you don’t look, I cry for you. I cry for a lot of people, but for you especially. Not that I’m ashamed of that, it’s just when you catch me red-eyed, you freeze because there’s nothing you can do, so you sneer and joke around and call me crybaby, which isn’t fair: I never cried as a baby, and I can’t remember the last time I cried for myself.
Which makes me a hypocrite, I suppose. At least you wince when the cries in your chest become too loud to ignore. Inside of me, there is only silence, and honestly, I am too afraid to look.