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You were betrayed for the first time when you were a young child.
The first betrayal was a continuous betrayal, and other people would probably consider such a betrayal to be multiple betrayals wrapped messily with a shredded bow. The wrapping paper of the betrayal is torn, as if the gift of it was thrown against the wall and sent clattering to the floor in a bout of anger, and the insides have been left broken in the aftermath. You, unlike others, do not know how to identify the distinction between all the various betrayals. In the aftermath, you feel like you have been left broken on the floor too.
It is hard to define betrayal in the moments it happens, and it is even harder to articulate through your blubbering tears why it hurts so goddamn much. Even when you know that the betrayal is something that would be considered wrong in the eyes of many other people, it doesn’t feel like you have any right to be angry. In the quivering aftermath, where you shake and wait for the return of a vengeful ghost, it doesn’t get any easier to place the blame where it truly belongs.
You’re the fucking useless one!
Is there even a point in defining a distinction between betrayal done to you and betrayal you claim to feel? Sometimes, even when you know, deep in your chest, that the word betrayal is the most accurate descriptor, it feels like too much of an accusation to call yourself betrayed. In the end, the results are always the same. They are dead, and you are left watching in the aftermath. You are dead, and you are left watching in the aftermath. You are only ever able to say sorry to cold corpses and the vanished ghosts of dead people who do not want to talk to you.
Sometimes, the thoughts of betrayal continue to loop in your head over and over and over again until you have trouble remembering how exactly something happened. Some days, it feels impossible to distinguish what truly happened from what you think happened. Regardless of how willing you are to visit the graves and regardless of how much remorse you claim to feel, the thoughts remain, lingering even though they are unwanted, and you continue choking on water in forever punishment. That, in a way, is a betrayal too. It is the second betrayal in a long line of betrayals. It is a betrayal to yourself, and that betrayal is the final nail in the coffin of making you lose yourself somewhere along the way.
In your memories, vivid and wretched, you take a gun and you point it at the perpetrator of the first betrayal, and you try to tell yourself that you did not feel guilty for protecting yourself. It never works. You’ve never been very good at lying to others, and you’ve certainly never been very good at lying to yourself. A tough outer exterior, projected to defend yourself from being betrayed again, only helps so much. In the end, you are soft, and you know you are soft. You have always been soft, but also not. The roughened, sharp edges of you are not all pretend. It is easy to cut everyone who dares to come near you. You find yourself wondering, some days, if you were actually the one to pull the trigger, or if you just made up a childish, puerile story of tripping to comfort and soothe your aching heart.
In the end, maybe it doesn't matter if you pulled the trigger in a way that worked. The ending remains the same regardless. You still feel more like that dented box, thrown against a wall and bruised and aching, than a girl. Even when you get away from something, even if that getting away comes in the form of a careening plane and the reverberating impact of a crash, the taste of blood in your mouth and betrayal still lingers. You wash your hands of the blood, scrubbing harshly, but no matter how hard you try, the water is always tainted with redness.
In the wilderness, there were no sinks around you to wash the blood from your hands, and for a moment, you could pretend to push the thoughts of betrayal away. When a gun was raised and pointed towards you and when your hands trembled on the trigger when it was your turn, you were forced to reckon with the fact that forgetting is impossible, but for a moment you could almost pretend.
Surrounded by wild things, you found something that could almost be called solace. You found someone, and for the first time, you saw your reflection in someone else’s eyes. He held a gun too, and his shoulders hunched forward as if there was a feeling of wrongness pushing him down, forcing him to kneel, too. You could not tell, then, if you loved him or if you were merely obsessed with the idea of being truly seen by him, but in the aftermath, you think it might have been a mix of both. There was always a constant push and pull between you and him. Why would it not be both?
You knew you loved him later, you knew and you were devastated when you continued to reflect on each other in such parallelism that you might as well have been the one to kill him yourself, but it was never really a romantic sort of love. It was love and it was obsession, wrapped up prettily with a bow. The outside exterior of the box was shiny and innocent at first glance, but it didn't take much observation to realize that the inside, containing two broken dolls that held hands only because their hands had been sewn together, was something that could be considered a horrifying thing.
Not long after you found out, you pressed a gun to your chin, waiting to be reunited with him, but you were stopped from ever fulfilling the wish you’ve dreamt of for as long as you can remember. You were back on the brink, and then you were being pulled back again. It always felt wrong to kill yourself before, to dishonor a sacrifice made to keep you alive, but his death felt a little bit like forgiveness, like permission being granted to pull the trigger of a horrible weapon for one final time. You were not granted permission to forgive yourself too.
Once, when you were in the wilderness, you betrayed someone, someone who helped you when you were meant to die, in a way that you can never come back from— even in death. You lived because of his brother and his brother died because he tried to save you. You can’t help but think that was the worst thing you ever did, even if it meant ensuring your survival for the time being. It was the most horrifying thing, and it plagues your nightmares and it haunts you in all the moments you can not distance yourself from reality. It is harder to distance yourself when you are a ghost, watching and waiting, the echoes of desperate pleadings for help reverberating off the walls of your skull. Inaction, in that moment you could have moved, is the worst thing you ever did. You could’ve spent your entire life trying to make up for it, attempting to repent, but you still never would have been able to make up for it. There is no making up for surviving.
You were pulled back from grabbing his hand, hauling him to the surface of the frigid water, but you could’ve reached back. When it happened, you told yourself that you could not have prevented it, but in the aftermath, you knew that you could have at least tried. It probably would not have done much to save anyone, not in a way that was helpful to you or him, but you could have tried anyway. They would've killed you for your insolence, but you still could've reached back anyway. It probably would have been better to die that way than continue living as a coward.
Later, you did not take any hand offered to you because you knew you did not deserve such a thing, and in the end, it makes sense that reaching for a hand and then throwing yourself in front of that hand when it was threatened, was what killed you. Penance for your betrayal. In your last moments, all you could think about was the fairness of justice being served at last. You never quite recovered from your role in any of the betrayals of your life, whether you were the betrayer or betrayed, and you think you never deserved to. In the end, you couldn’t help but be a bit glad that was your doom. You know, from experience, that there are worse ways to lose yourself. There have always been worse ways.
After that betrayal of innocence, you lost yourself for a final time in a way you never learned how to come back from, in a way that was impossible to come back from, and you were appointed as the leader. You did not want to be the leader. You never wanted to be a leader at all. You shredded the costume of it from yourself the moment nobody was looking, and sometimes, you took it off even sooner than that, exhausted by the mere thought of power. Power was never something you wanted at all, but you took it into your grasp because you did not know what else to do when it was presented to you.
For a short time, you could’ve been considered a good leader. You were a good leader in keeping people alive at least, not so good in the emotional aspect of it, but still, a temporarily good leader is better than a continuously bad one, is it not? In the end, that was your downfall; the lack of connection paired with the crumbling so easily under any pressure. A simple raised voice had you cowering because it felt like your father’s voice being raised at you once again, the vengeful ghost appearing at long last. If you stared at the sky for too long, you could almost convince yourself that he was there, snarling at you with disdain and telling you that this was always what you were meant to become. It was easy for you to reach for a gun and point it at him, he would say, so why would it have been any less easy in the lawless wilderness?
Once, you had someone, someone who knew the same feeling of loneliness you did intimately. He was both a friend and a father to you at once. A loving parent who took the place of the loving parent you never had before. An understanding friend at the same time. You lost him the same moment the last shred of innocence slipped from your grip, bubbling beneath the icy surface of the water. One time in his class, you flinched when someone raised their voice, and you could tell, from the empathetic look in his eyes and from the scrunch of his eyebrows being pushed together, that he knew. He was kinder to you than the others, more obvious in his love. In practice, sometimes, you froze, but he did not chide you for freezing and instead let you sit aside until the terror passed.
It is not that he didn’t love the others as much as he loved you, but that there is a love that comes from knowing the spindly and sharp roots of a person. Sometimes, it is easier to show your love to someone just as damaged as you, lying side by side on a forest floor, knowing you are going to die if not at that moment then soon enough. You knew what it felt like to have no one, not even your family, who cared about you, and you knew that he knew that feeling too.
But he didn’t want anything to do with you, in the end, and there that familiar feeling was again. You think it was perhaps a fair feeling to be assigned to you, even as much as it ached. You told him you were the worst of everyone and you told him to leave because he was purer than you ever had been, but you never got the chance to tell him why you were the worst. Not even in death will you get to tell him because you can not find his ghost. You roam, empty-handed and empty-hearted.
You pointed a gun at him and the safety was off, but you didn’t tighten your finger on the trigger like you had so many times before. The safety was off, yet you did not pull the trigger. You didn’t want to. Later, even though he no longer trusted you, you tried your best to save him, but it was a pointless endeavor. He had been tainted, betrayed, by the very act of knowing you. You tried, but you couldn’t help but crumble under the pressure of voices yelling at you. You dug your nails into the skin of your arm, hoping to distract yourself, but it did not help. You cried, and you knew, in the end, that you failed him. You knew that he wasn't guilty of the wrongness they all claimed her was guilty of, but it didn’t matter what you knew. In your life, it never once ever mattered what you knew, and you never once held sway over anyone else, even when you were said to be powerful.
There was understanding in those last moments you saw each other, returned after being taken away, but in the end, it was not enough to save him. Sometimes, it feels like a betrayal to even think about him. You know that, beyond what you already did, there was nothing more you could have realistically done, but you feel the weight of guilt on your shoulders anyway.
After his trial, your body ached and your rule was overthrown, but still, you helped get everyone out of there. You never wanted to look a single one of them in the eyes again for what they destroyed that day, but you helped anyway. Others tried to redeem themselves from the way they betrayed you, attempting to help you stand back up, but you did not want their help. You went from rehab, paid for by them, but you went right back to drugs and alcohol again immediately after, not even bothering to pretend that you got better. You threatened people and you got punished for fighting more than once, and it was only in your last moments that you realized you did want help in finding a life other than that after all. By then, asking for that help was far too late and frightening of a thing, impossible in the wake of your death.
When you left the wilderness, you tracked down and found the man that your friend loved and you gave him the last traces of him that he left with you, pouring your heart out and leaving yourself empty in the process. There were some lies, sure, as lies have always been an essential thing but more so then, but still, you gave him enough to illustrate that you cared for him. You told his love that he died before things got as bad as they did, and you did so knowing that it was a kindness for him to think he knew what happened rather than be left wondering. That, more than the wilderness, was the true beginning of your end. In that moment, you lost your purpose. If it weren’t so sad, it’d be kind of funny that you died, in a cruel twist of irony, the moment you got that purpose back.
You think your entire life could be considered a downward spiral, and it was a spiral that can't even said to have started with being stranded in the wilderness. You almost laugh about that too, but it’s not actually funny. You were ruined far before the wilderness, you fell into drugs far before escaping, and you know everyone else knew it. They taunted you with the knowledge of it until they could no longer taunt you. Then, after, they taunted you more. You felt a spark of hope, in the end, but the flame of it engulfed your body as if it had been drenched in gasoline.
When you are a ghost of your former self, you sit at the pew during your own funeral. Nobody sees you, and nobody seems all that sad. It is unfortunate, but not terribly surprising. You wouldn't miss yourself either. Even your own mother cannot muster up a single thing to say that would imply she will miss you. She is glad you are dead, you know it, and there is clarity to be found in confirming what you’ve always known. You can't really blame her, in the end. You probably wouldn't have cried if she'd died either.
When you got back from the wilderness, no hug or kind words were waiting for you. You thought you could tell that she’d hoped you’d died somewhere along the way, ridding herself of the reminder of you, but you weren’t sure if you were imagining the look. Knowing of your mother’s gladness would be a shame if you hadn’t already been made aware of it throughout your entire life, having to reckon with the feeling of being unwanted over and over and over again.
No ghosts sit beside you, glimmering, in the pews, and the people who are alive and you thought would’ve cared did not show up. It is unfortunate, but not terribly surprising either.
This is how it was always supposed to end for you.