So, in the dark of the night, I chose a fate for both Alessandra and myself, and prayed to whatever could hear me that I would escape this ordeal alive.
Growing up, it hung as a shadow over my head. Mostly because my parents were always afraid that it was going to happen to me, or my little brother, Max. Of course, with my morose disposition and general introversion, I suppose I was the greater concern.
Out of the thirty-two pictures in the album, we identified twenty of them. All of them infants, all of them dying within a few months of being born. We might have been able to identify more, I suspect, but some of the stones were so old that the inscriptions had been rubbed away and were unreadable.
Pain is a very strange thing. It can sharpen your senses, make the world seem clearer, if applied in the right dosage. But if there’s too much, then it begins to blur everything and you find that your world no longer makes sense. That was how the world seemed to me, a soupy mess of nonsense. There was pain, of course, thick and ever-present. But I couldn’t tell where it began or where it ended.
I’ve never much liked psychologists.
And those eyes – oh, God, those eyes.
It’s been a while. I don’t know if anyone can read this. It’s my most desperate hope that this somehow finds its way online – and that someone can save me from reality, because reality has become too heinous to bear.
At seemingly random times, I would become completely catatonic. Someone would call my name and I wouldn’t respond. I wouldn’t blink. I wouldn’t move. Sometimes, it was even hard to tell if I was breathing or not.
With time, I forgot the nightmare. Or, rather, stopped thinking about it. I don’t think I can ever forget a sight that awful, but the image dulled over time. But that coldness always stayed imprinted on my mind. The farm was never a warm place again for me.
When I grew up, all I knew about my birth family came to me in the form of a small box.