I know what I said. I remember swearing into the dark, the promise as brittle as a matchstick—hatred will carry me, vengeance will be my backbone, the world will answer with ash and names. It was easy to swear when the nights were merely long. It became nearly impossible when the nights became instruments.
They learned how to hurt me. Not in a madman's frenzy but with the patient cruelty of people who treat a thing as an experiment. The jokes, the shoves, the empty words—those are hammers that chip at pride. The true lesson was in the slow contraptions: ritualized deprivation, humiliation performed with ritual exactness, a teacher's voice turning policy into punishment.
They isolated me. Locked me in closets where a single ray of light became a sun you could not look away from, a spotlight that showed me as a grotesque silhouette. They gave me food and fed it back to me like a lesson, then withheld it, learned how hunger foamed at my teeth. They tuned the world so every sense betrayed me: the bleach of the janitor's closet became the scent of my life thinning away, the scrape of a chair leg the metronome of my failure.
A week before I left, they introduced the room they called The Furnace. They never used a flame. What they wanted was the feeling of fire without the mess of ash. I sat in a small chamber with walls of black glass that reflected me too long. When they closed the hatch there was no sound but a high, electric hum that rattled the bones in my jaw. Thin rods of energy — not burning flesh, but searing nerve-end — threaded through the air and touched the skin like a cold brand that shifted into heat, like someone playing chords on my nerves and refusing to stop until my body learned the song.
It wasn't the pain that killed me so much as the way it erased me. The rods did not break skin. They did not tear. They brought a fire that lived in the nerves and in the marrow, a sensation like walking through flame barefoot for a day until your steps become automatic and you forget you're wounded. Every inch of my skin was a map of unending taps; every breath a ragged rhythm. The Furnace was a machine for attention: once the rods touched you, they held your consciousness hostage. Hunger and thirst and sleep no longer served anything but prolonging the sentence. They watched from the crack and laughed like scholars.
If that had been all, perhaps I would have lasted it and come out a different man. But they layered the torture. They took a memory — small and precise — and they made it a reverberating bell.
They called it the Mirror of Evening. It was nothing more than a slate and a speaker, a device for sewing nightmares. When I was weak from the Furnace they turned the Mirror on. It forced me back into the fluorescent halls of the hospital, into the smell of disinfectant and lemon cleaner. It let me see my mother as she had been on that bed: the tremor in her lip, the way her fingers found mine without strength, the sleep in her eyes that was not sleep but a slow break. The machine did not invent her; it replayed her with a fidelity only the cruel could love. It let me hear the machines clicking like a clock and the doctor's voice, all the soft platitudes that meant nothing. It let me reach and not touch.
And it repeated this until the image was no longer memory but a current draining through me. They synchronized the Mirror with the Furnace so that every time I saw her eyes, the rods pressed higher, a hot white pressure behind them so precise I felt my marrow retract. They made me feel the finality of that hospital bed a dozen different ways: as smell, as taste, as sound, as a pressure in the chest that could not be breathed around.
The worst part was a thing they called the Silence. For eighty hours I had neither sight nor sound. The hatch closed and every sense was smothered. It is one thing to feel pain; it is another to be denied the ability to anchor pain to story. With the Furnace and the Mirror and the Silence combined, my memories began to unspool. When I finally saw the light again, I could not tell whether the hospital had happened yesterday or a hundred years ago. Time lost its contour; the past smeared into the present like oil. Identity is stitched together by memory. That week the seams were cut.
It doesn't end there. This time in the cafeteria, the luminosity felt impossibly bright, every harsh fluorescent light casting a glare on the floor that seemed to swallow me whole. They pushed me into the centre, and I moved without thought, a marionette with broken strings, lips parting to hum the tune they had chosen, legs shuffling in a rhythm that didn't belong to me. Faces blurred into a tide of laughter and whispers, yet none of it registered—there was no shame left in me, only the hollow echo of years spent ignored, shoved down, beaten in small ways until I had no fight left. Each step, each note, was a repetition of a thousand moments I had already endured, a lifetime compressed into these few minutes of naked exposure. And I felt nothing but emptiness, the cruel light reflecting being erased, erased in my own life. While I turned into a ghost, while I started to forget about who I truly was, my opinions, my likes and my dislikes. They laughed and the world looked on.
They added one final cruelty the way a composer ends a piece with a single off-key note that makes the room shiver. They took something I had never given them: control. They built a simulation of agency and offered it as a taunt.
A volunteer—one of the boys who had always smiled too easily—was assigned to me as an attendant. He held the dish, the towel, the careful look that made this a human theatre. He would offer kindness in small gestures and then, without warning, remove them. He made me taste water and then took it away; he lifted a cloth to my forehead and then let it fall; he told me a story and stopped before the end. It was a chess game played with mercy.
Then, the night before I left, they performed one last experiment in meanness: they staged a perfect, slow, something they called a "closing." They brought the boy in and told me I could speak once. One word, one name. My mother's name. The boy's eyes were soft. He said, "If you say it, we will let you sleep."
I don't know if it was real hunger or a hunger for connection; my voice had been starved to a dry rasp. I said her name aloud. It left me like a plea. The boy's face collapsed for a second; then the supervisors leaned in with commodity smiles and the hatch slammed. Nothing changed. Sleep did not come. Instead, the Furnace started again, and the Mirror showed me the thing I feared: the way her mouth had formed words I could not catch. The pity was theatrical; the cruelty exquisite.
Everything narrowed to a single honest thought then, as if a threshold opened and I had to choose.
If I go, who will be left to look after her?
...
Is my brain not working? Or have I just not accepted it yet?
My mother, who lit up my world and was the only one who cared for me... is dead.
My mother is dead.
My mother is dead.
My mother is dead.
It's about time, time to end it all.
Two days later I went up the steps of the tallest building I could find. The city glittered like a contemptuous audience. I held the parapet, tasted the metal, and thought of the fluorescent light and the lemon cleaner, of the boy with the attenuated kindness, of the Mirror and the Furnace. I thought of the last thing she had said before the doctors closed the curtain— clean, simple—take care of yourself. Even in the simulation the voice broke.
I stepped forward and embraced the end of this depressive story.
...
...
The fall should have been an erasure. Instead, it wound me into a new shape. The roof, the wind, the brief flight—those were technicalities. I expected rubble and then nothing. I expected the end of sound. What happened was neither heaven nor hell at first. It was a sudden and impossible calm.
Grass under me, the sun on my face old as memory. A field so absurdly whole that the ache inside me—the small coal they had stoked—did not immediately flare. For a single long stunned moment I could not remember the faces I had been given. I knew only that something had delivered me from the silence they had engineered. I laughed without humor, like someone who has been given breath after water.
And as the absurdity of my survival touched me, a sound cut through the air—a laugh not kind, not cruel, but like iron ringing. A silhouette, a voice, not from any place that taught cruelty for sport. "Heaven?" it said, mocking the idea as if it were a joke someone told to annoy a god.
I turned and the world shifted. The lesson was not over. What had been an end was a beginning, and the beginning wore a smile.