Bleeding Out

First Blood

Alone.

It's a word I've always known. I never had friends, not real ones anyway, but I thought I had family. I thought I belonged.

I didn't. I did not belong with them. I belong alone, I know that now; I deserve this. I deserve to be alone. Not the kind of alone that everyone is, not just by myself, not just lonely, but truly ALONE. The kind of alone that is a feeling- a feeling you can't share with anyone, a despair, a hopelessness so overwhelming that it devours all other feelings. The kind of alone you can only experience alone. Nobody can relate to you or share your burden -- nobody can reach you. There must be others, hollowed out inside, shuffling about numbly, unable to reach anyone, out of anyone's reach. Out of my reach.

But they might as well be dead.

I might as well be dead. My old relatives treat me like a ghost, the crowds in public places see only my shadow. I am a living phantasm. Imaginary. Not REAL. And I am Alone. That type of alone that anyone can feel but nobody can express, the kind of alone that constantly reminds of your aloneness, the kind of alone that feels like being forgotten.

Forgotten. Abandoned. Deemed unsavory and thrown out like maggot cheese that has turned to flies. I was loved once, but now I don't even exist. I was adored. Touted by my peers and relatives as a genius, a prodigy, a martyr, a sacrifice. Then they killed me -- not my body, but my soul. To them, I never was. They turned on me, called me insane. They called me a Demon. I had no peers. I had no family. Those I once loved abandoned me, forgot me, put me out in the cold, left me -- a hollow shell, robbed of its purpose and discarded like so much refuse -- those who showered me in love left me alone.

An empty vessel, a masterless slave, I was bound to a world that I was permanently disconnected from. I was flung headfirst into a world I could never connect to. However, I have learned something about being Alone; the hollowness, the emptiness, the space between existence and death, the VOID has shown me something. Something that can't exist. The reason I was sacrificed. The VOID shared with me TRUE LONELINESS. The VOID gave me it's own face. Perhaps they killed my body too. Perhaps even they cannot kill a soul. Perhaps I shall rise from my grave, and they will fear my mangled, soulless husk; they will look into my dull eyes and see Death, they will smell the blood and bile oozing from my flesh, and they will hear it, the song of the VOID sung by infinite echoes: ALONE IS THE HEART THAT BLEEDS NO LONGER, GONE IS HIS LIFE, HE KNOWS ONLY HUNGER.