March 2, 2004 — 11:47 p.m.
"Little bird beneath the pane,
You sang until the world grew sane.
I watched your wings forget to fly,
And felt the calm when you would die.
You taught me peace through quiet breath,
There's beauty, too, in gentle death."
People like to say every monster was once a child.
They never talk about how that child learns to stop crying.
I still remember the smell of our house—rust and rain and something burnt that never went away. My father's voice was thunder, my mother's silence the lightning that came after. I used to crawl under the old wooden table and trace the cracks in the grain until I memorized them. That was my kingdom. Small, dark, and safe in a way no one else ever felt safe.
When he shouted, I listened. When he struck, I counted. Pain had rhythm; it was predictable. And in that rhythm, there was a strange comfort—like the ticking of a clock that only I could hear.
At school I was the quiet one. Teachers loved that; it meant I could vanish in plain sight. But I wasn't quiet inside. My head was loud—thoughts pacing back and forth like caged things. I watched everyone else: laughing, pretending, acting like the world cared. It didn't. It never did.
The first time I saw something die, it wasn't a person. A sparrow had flown into our window. It lay there twitching, one wing bent wrong. I didn't try to save it; I just watched. When it stopped moving, everything around me went still too. I didn't feel horror or sadness, just a weird calm, like I'd finally understood something important.
By twelve, I'd already figured out empathy isn't some sacred thing. It's a switch. People flip it on so they can feel noble. I learned how to keep mine off.
Books were my escape—or my training ground, maybe both. I read the poets who wrote about death like it was art. Poe. Plath. Baudelaire. Their words cut clean. They made the darkness sound almost beautiful. I started writing too. My mother found one of my poems once. She didn't say anything, just looked at me like she didn't know who I was anymore. Maybe she didn't.
When my father died, they said it was a heart attack. I didn't correct them. His silence after that was the first peaceful thing he ever gave us. I remember standing by his bed, feeling nothing. No hate. No grief. Just quiet.
After that, I stopped trying to be what people wanted. I smiled when I had to, spoke when expected, learned to mirror emotions like lines in a play. It worked. People always believe what reflects them.
But the ticking in my head never went away. It kept whispering about balance—about wrong things that needed to end. Maybe I wasn't broken. Maybe I was the balance.
That's where it started. Not in rage, not in insanity. In silence.
In the realization that the world doesn't need more good people.
It needs endings that make sense.
Animal Comparison: The Sparrow — small, fragile, and overlooked; yet even the smallest wings tremble before the silence claims them.