THE UNFEELING

Uncle… He was… a strange man. On some levels, he was a rebel, but at the same time, a nerd who lived among books. A free thinker who could sometimes be mistaken for a vagabond. A free spirit that ran out of steam before hitting the road? However you want to describe him, one thing was certain—he didn’t fit in at all, especially not as an Ember like we were. Besides his brother, no one wanted to be around him. I guess not even my mom.

He never told me that, but I could put the pieces together. So, he left for a long time. I guess Dad never thought he’d see him again. Nonsense—he loved his brother, of that I’m sure. But in the end, I think part of him died when his brother did, and he wasn’t whole to begin with. It was as if… there was still some color in teaching me, helping me, fostering a kid he never wanted…

But none in living.

What wouldn’t I give to talk to him again. To tell him how I owe most of the good things I’ve managed to do to him. Now that I’m older, now that I understand pain. Now that I understand what it truly means to be exhausted, lost, and alone.

He never wanted a family, a child. He despised the idea of being part of this society. And yet, he did it. I bet he did it better than most. At least as best as he could, considering he wasn’t a citizen. Never mind that he was holding on—holding on to what, I don’t know—but not crumbling into a puddle of torment and loneliness. Still, he did it. I was the one who failed.

“So, I’ll try to do that, to the best of my ability. But I’ve thought a lot about it, and I don’t think I’ll follow the government’s guidelines or content,” he said with a grin on his face, showing me the badly printed Ember-issued school books. “You know you have to be homeschooled by law, right?” he added, trying to keep life moving after the accident.

“After all, I can’t teach you much about keeping a house tidy, cooking like a chef, or wife duties. All I can help you with is a bit of rudimentary science and biased art.” He smiled at his own words. I did too. Fortunately, The Flame and his SMOKE bastards didn’t care much about women’s education. People didn’t care about the absurdity of studying—let alone a girl studying.

I see that now, and I think I saw it then, at least a little. He gave me wings the only way he knew how. In a certain way, it only takes one mistake, one slip, and everything changes for good.

The worst part was hearing about the society I lived in. Even though I understood how bad it was, there’s something about humanity that requires us to learn through experience. We have to endure pain and hardship before we truly comprehend it. Even then, many people never do.

Not even after a lifetime of suffering through lies, violence, and hypocrisy. It seems humans need a prerequisite to understand horrors, and language alone is not always enough…

I felt as if time was slipping through my fingers while life was happening outside, without me. As bad as things were, I used to think at least they were happening. And I wasn’t a prisoner. But try telling that to a teenager. I wasn’t mistreated, yet I felt wronged. I was cared for, yet I felt suffocated.

Time squeezes you… or, more precisely, the feeling of being stuck while time passes by crushes your chest. At least it did for me, compressing me into a tiny ball of misguided resentment. One day, I smashed a glass for no reason I could understand.

I wanted to step on it, barefoot. “But guess what,” as I would say, Uncle was there to fix my mess, as usual. It kills me to remember that I also wanted him to step on it, just to hurt him a little. He didn’t deserve that. Hell, neither did I, but what is the essence of anything, really?

From that day on, smashing something became almost a need. At the time, I thought he didn’t notice. In retrospect, the pain was visible to him because he felt it too. But at least he tried to fix it, in his own way, with his books and his movies. So, he doubled down, becoming even more attentive, “the jerk.” At least he tried… I… I just kept making things worse.

I could see him deteriorating. Aside from the usual sadness in his eyes, there was now an added weight—the recognition that he wasn’t doing a good job raising his niece. The gap between us started to grow wider, and not even the little things we used to enjoy could hold us together anymore. I used to love microwaving our food and watching old nonsense TV shows he smuggled in.

But that drove him quiet, distant. I was killing whatever was still alive inside him.

Everything started to feel like torture. Whatever activity he thought of doing, whatever effort he made to make me happy… I didn’t know anything then, and I’m not sure how much I know now, but I can see how wrong I was. Everything just stirred up this bubbly, effervescent kind of anger I had inside.

Life was turning black and white in front of my eyes. Most times, I would just miss my parents. Or even the idea of having parents—it was hard to make them tangible again. More and more, the only thing that felt real was the urge to smash things until the world and everyone in it made sense again. I thought life had wronged me, so maybe I had to wrong it back.

I often blamed myself too. It was irrational, I knew that. But who’s rational in this world, anyway? I was traveling backward in a tunnel that was all colorful, yet all I wanted, all I strove for, was that black-and-white end of it. It was then that I thought it was a good idea to shove things deep down to stop feeling like that. I didn’t like going through their stuff, so we boxed everything up. It was that or burn the house down. But we had nowhere else to live, so…

I only kept her rosary. It made me uncomfortable; I always felt that way about that image… but it was hers. She loved that thing so much… I don’t know, it felt special, warmer. Or maybe I just wanted to see the quiet desperation on Uncle’s face every time he saw me wearing it. A few years later, I found one of her red heels. How rebellious of her, I thought. I still have no idea why she had them or where she wore them.

Maybe that’s why I felt an irresistible urge to wear them—it made me feel good. Putting the slippers away awakened some womanhood inside me. I quite enjoyed it. If I hadn’t been so stupid afterward, who knows, I might have been a woman who wore high heels all the time…

By the time I reached the end of my teens, time seemed to slow down. Slower than before. I felt like I was dragging my body through each tick of their boxed-up old clock. The sun still shined, the birds still sang. “How bad could the world outside be? Surely not everyone was a psycho cultist, right?” I’m ashamed of what came next. What a dramatic little bird I was. There was no cage—I was protected, sheltered. Yet I bubbled with resentment like a prisoner who knows he’s innocent.

If only Uncle had hidden everything from me, I’d have an excuse. But no, he taught me about the world. About the collapse of society. About the damn pills. Freaking Paxxin and their chemical atrocity called INPAXX. About PAXXERS and non-PAXXERS, Embers, Wildhearts, all of it.

How they were supposed to save humanity, to protect us from our emotions, from ourselves. To quiet down the emotions that tore us apart, to bring us all together. But when you bargain with your own nature, unnatural costs appear. And with them come walls, guns, crosses, and flames. That’s how you lead a connected world back to feudalism. Because that’s what happened—I don’t care what the new books say. Uncle was right.

The most unnatural cost was going back in time. Instead of castle walls, barbed wire and turrets. Instead of a Roman Church of sword and fire, we got churches of lead and fire. Kings of a sort, mummies of the modern world, golden sarcophagi, and prophecies. Oh, my, I had forgotten about those nightmares… always the same. I would be eating frozen food in the kitchen while watching my uncle wither away like a mummy. The food looked fine, but it tasted rotten. Maybe I was chewing my tongue in my sleep.

I don’t think I ever dreamed, even though I read and watched most of the positive educational stories he gave me. Still, my mind refused to give me relief. Even asleep, there were no wonderlands or genies in bottles. Just rotten food and old men in microwaves. For nights and nights during those days, I was miserable and ignorant of all the things I should have been thankful for. But there was no space for gratitude—the will to break was much stronger than the idea of building. Maybe I’m just the rightful daughter of this Paxxin mess. Instead of fighting a war worth fighting, I was battling myself and the one who cared for me. And, as in the real world, where the horrors of the non-Paxxin resistance matched those of the PAXXERS, I was being just as unfair as I claimed life to be.

And so, darker days were born from the dark thoughts in my head. One day, I came so close to seeing the truth. But instead, I decided to turn a blind eye to it in the form of a noose and an anchor. But instead of tying them to myself, my epiphany was that, somehow, I was dragging him down with me into the darkness, and there was only one way to stop it. I wasn’t a child anymore. Hell, I didn’t even feel like a person. The accident had set something ablaze inside me. The rest, I burned myself.

No logic or warm rationalization from my uncle could ever tame it. I wanted to hurt the world, myself, and everyone around me. Even knowing that I didn’t have the worst of it—I had a house, a caring tutor, an education that none of my contemporaries had—still, I wanted to burn everything to ashes. Maybe even myself.

…And so I did.