Confessions of a Serial Killer
You stand, waiting at a roundabout for the oncoming car to pass, before he decides to turn off early, without indication. You’re enjoying the peace at a local park, when a suspicious citizen questions your intentions until you leave. You’re running for a bus, and a car follows you down the road, taking photographs. The car beside you refuses to let you merge as you are forced into their lane by roadworks. Whilst walking to a friends house a few streets over, someone attempts to take your wallet. You fend off a guard dog on your way to and from the front door of a house that was expecting your delivery. For the most part, minor nuisances, inconveniences and irritations, which are surely familiar, in some form or another, to most others. So if they're so universal, why is it that memories of such common trespasses make me feel so murderous? These memories take hold, and squeeze me dry of rationality. They bubble away, churning and folding, multiplying in the quiet of time. A pleasant walk becomes a race across thinning ice. An hour of reading becomes an eternity of old transgressions. If the thought experiments of how best to dismember a body with my bare hands stayed solely in the non-physical realm then I would continue them as a silent pleasure without issue. However, with each initiation of imagined violence, I feel my chest tighten and my teeth grit. Unspoken words twist my face, and un-thrown blows jolt my arms. I embody the imagined. I become the volcano. The visceral nature of my thoughts of revenge is so familiar to me that until now, at the age of 30, I hadn’t considered them something to question. It’s all I’ve known, after all. Everybody has bad days. Everybody imagines things that they hope they would never do. Simply apply your breathing technique of choice, go to your happy place, take your pills, see your shrink, watch your show or do whatever else completes the task of luring Jack back into his box. Today, however, I did turn my thoughts in on themselves as it bothered me how tense by body felt, when my intention was nothing other than to wile the day away at the park with a coffee and a book. I knew my thoughts were exhuming the correct grave, as my mind suddenly began craving the sweet release provided by video games and antisocial media. I am my own best used-car salesman when a distraction device is requested by my subconscious. As people passed me, I saw lifeless news feeds reflected on faces, curious glances and eyes too nervous to settle on me. I saw blank stares, quiet conversations and joggers concentrations. What I didn't see, however, were jolting arms and twisting faces. That was all me. I wondered for the first time ever what effects these small, reoccurring tensions may cause in their summation, over a lifetime. I had always seem these ruminations as an unnecessary and indulgent pastime of my mind, that I didn't particularly enjoy or dislike. They were simply an artefact of existence, to be endured when they, on occasion, arose. Fight through and carry on. Now I see them as a risk to my health, and with new concern, ponder their utility. Psychology tells us that memories aren't meant to be happy. Nor are they meant to be accurate, chronological or complete. Evolution dictates that memories serve as teachable moments, reproduced when we need the education, in the service of not dying. By this model, the ongoing perpetuation of these reflections tells me that I’ve polished the looking glass too clear. I’ve wiped the grimy nuance of context and circumstance from a beautiful yet impossible sense of right and wrong. Once cannot decipher the meaning without the key, and how can one correctly file away the message before deciphering the meaning? Hiding keys is something I’m good at. If I suspect the drink is poisoned, after all, then why would I drink it? The poisoned drink does not simply vanish, un-drunk, however. It crawls deep beneath the mound of consciousness until it is compressed into reflective glass, nestled amongst other mirrors. This insight might explain to some degree why I’m periodically haunted by thoughts of mashing people into the ground with the heel of my boot. Still, this doesn’t help break the cycle. For that, I need to rewrite each narrative until my ancestral brain is satisfied with the insights. Whether the morals to each story are real or imagined, I don’t expect it much matters. All I know is that these insignificant memories stand ahead of others, falsely claiming there is still something to be learned from them. It’s time to throw the mulch of reality at their surface, so that they may blend back in with all the rest. But how to do that? Take each example and question it. Ask, why did it make me feel this way? I found that the thread that ties these questioned memories together is woven from injustice. An unwelcome deviation from the expected, and justice was not served. These thoughts are active cases. They linger, unresolved. It makes perfect sense then, that I imagine taking matters into my own hands and solving them. Closing cases, one corpse at a time. Though still the memories attack me, because of a new injustice - my murderous response. A misjudgement whilst driving does not warrant your death of course, though a pardon – forgiving the other – is a virtue heralded by those too weak to take revenge. With each admission of weakness, the self deteriorates further. At first your demise must be viscerally imagined, so that I may move on by forgiving only myself.
- Aluca Sol
