I couldn’t meet her gaze. I couldn’t sleep later. I could see, later, what I had done with so much thought and fear. I did it two more times, each time engaging in the art of death. No moment to stop and consider the cost, or the damage, or the future. There are no moments available because time has ceased and been stripped of its serenity. It’s just a necklace of moments, strung together by the eventuality of more violence.
There will be no backstory or flashbacks to take you, the reader, into a psychoanalysis of the origins of violence in the violent. The violent’s world is a quiet one, where the cries from executioner and condemned is choked by nothingness. A world, fashioned by your own hands, skies expanded by arms’ lengths and soil made darker with more life shed. Visit another with violence, is on citizens’ lips. The world is solipsistic and inhabited only by the violent and his victims. Every kill makes the world thicker and more hollow.
Remember when love wasn’t returned? When your heart wasn’t respected? When your boundaries trespassed, your person used, your time wasted, your life belittled, your emotions mocked? The violent didn’t stop and choose to leave his world. He made violence his norm and ethos, his pain the ink on the declaration of war on future allies. Kills collected on a prized bedpost brought him to her tears, the bare moment where he destroyed his true love.
Violence lived is violence wrought.
