fish

The hardest part has been trying to resist giving in.

It would be so easy, wouldn't it? Just to snap, tear everything around me down around the ears of every motherfucker, everyone who took advantage of me since I got back, that patronizing freehold, all of them. What do I owe them? I didn't ask for this. No one would ask for this.

What did it matter anyway? The line between reality and fantasy, fact and fiction... Is there even a line? What we'd gone through was pulled straight from our memories, dreams and nightmares of both me and people as a whole. Had to be. So who's to say that she isn't still watching me through the glass? I can't know that this isn't just another fishbowl she's trapped me in. And I find it fucking amazing that anyone can be confident that this isn't just another trap.

I guess on some level, I know they're right. But they don't like me, anyway. There's no place for some stupid animal like me in their little group. I've tried. All I do is cause trouble and they give me this look of disgust. They try to be polite but I can see it on their faces.

So why the hell does /he/ believe in me? I've hurt him so many times. Yet every time I sink my teeth into his skin, he barely flinches. He dragged me off the street, and how have I repaid him? I broke all his china. Assaulted him a few times in some blind, idiot rage.

Why does he keep having faith in me? Why won't he just hate me like some normal person would?

Maybe... maybe at the end of the day this is some roundabout suicide. I'm stuck, aren't I? I haven't lost touch of my fetch, you know. He's successful, a proud man living a life he fucking stole from me. I'd love to tear him apart, throw whatever debris he's made of into the ocean... but it would never work, would it? He has ten years on me. She would never believe that this scrawny little underfed runt was their rich and powerful son, would she?

That's what gets to me the most. That's the part that isn't fair. That thing that came home wasn't me, but it stole every bit of time I had with her left. I see her smile at him, I see them laugh together... That should be me. But it isn't. And it never will be.

On some level, I understand that I'm not the only one that's lost something like this. It doesn't help. Not when all I can do is wring my hands, imagining that bastard's windpipe being crushed underneath them, but all it is is empty gestures. Impotent wishing. That's all I can do.

One day, my mother will die. That's something that will never leave my head. She'll die and the thing at her funeral won't be her son. It never loved her, just went through the motions, and the real thing will have never even gotten a chance to say goodbye.

I don't want to live like that. Every day that it weighs on my mind is another day of pain. So on some level it would be better if everyone would just leave me alone, let me fade away and be forgotten. Maybe I could get their permission to just stop living.

But they're not giving it. I've tried putting those quills around my heart as well as on my body, but it's not working.

There really isn't any choice but to accept them now, is there?