TW: Mental health, suicide, substance abuse

Nobody believed in me, that was their first mistake.

I was born within the walls of the Cook County Department of Corrections with my mother cuffed to the bed. She was the only family I saw before being taken away by social services. My father, who’s charged for the same crime as my mother, lay in another cell of the grand prison.

I bounced around foster families in my childhood days, with many giving me up after others convincing them that I am just like my family–barbaric, malevolent, psychotic even. Eventually DCFS placed me in a group home until I reached the age of 18. It was never a pleasant place. The kids who came in after me left before me with loving families, so my resentment towards them grew. It would be so much easier if I were normal.

Fitting in consumed my teenage years, desperate for the validations, I refused to visit my biological family so that people would see my difference. But I mostly kept out of the way, never raised my voice to other kids, never said no, never bent the rules, for what I could remember. That didn’t make much of a difference; my classmates spread rumors about the reason for my quietness being me planning my parents’ breakout. Teachers never liked me either, not for once did I receive an A on a project despite my hard work.

When I turned 18, the first thing I did was to get out of the group home. With the money I got from working as a fast food employee I bought my first house–a micro studio apartment. The kind where there was just enough space to walk around after putting in the basic furniture. With it came along my first rabbit, Winnie. She was my friend, and she was not for anyone to take.

I tried to do good for my community, volunteering at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and baking chocolate chip cookies and muffins for fundraisers. Life went on smoothly; my identity was unknown by most people for their lack of knowledge on past news. My co-workers and I hang out often, doing things I could only dream of doing as a kid, like having a sleepover, a bakeoff, a karaoke session. All that ended the day she entered my name on Google for fun. She was the last friend I ever had, I learned to avoid people, to make conversation awkward, to fade into the background.

My period of peace and quiet ended when my father -who I only saw photographs of- escaped out of prison. Soon paparazzi crammed in the small corridor outside of my apartment, shoving a microphone and strings of questions up my throat. Complaints from my neighbours flooded in, demanding my eviction. Not long after the stories went viral, death threats took control of my inbox. I isolated myself in the small one bedroom apartment where I felt the most safe, curtains closed to block the never-ending harassers demanding my eviction on the street, with only Winnie around to accompany me.

A few days passed and the Chicago Union Station massacre headlined every news station in America, my father committed suicide after shooting the final victim in the head, once, twice, three times. For the first time in months, I left my house. It felt as a moral obligation to apologize for the pain he inflicted. The grey polyester scarf hid my face as I hurried to the ceremony held in the station, no one noticed me there, no reporter with a bulky camera capturing my every move, because everybody is here to mourn for the lives taken by my father. I laid out flowers for them, flowers I spent hours picking by rereading their personality described by their loved ones. I detested myself at that moment for the jealousy I had for dead people simply because they were loved.

It was when I got home when I noticed something was horribly wrong. My door was swung wide open, the inside of the house was trashed, clothes ripped, walls graffitied in sharpie with the phrase “The soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter”, a play I devoted hours into studying. And worse of all, the stiff body of Winnie. This was the first time where the vivid image of killing sprawled into my head.

After the day, I fell into depressive episodes, ones worse than before. I relied heavily on Xanax that I purchased on the regular under an alias name. The pills lifted the darkness weighing me down like a blanket up temporarily, only for it to come back heavier, so the only fix is to take more pills. Day after day, week after week, month after month. One afternoon, it stopped. Not because I wanted to, but because I drained every last bit of money I saved. Withdrawal hit me hard and fast, the sleepless nights I spent lying on my bed, shivering, body convulsing, stumbling to the bathroom just to throw up nothing. It continued for a month, then there’s nothing, a bad kind of nothing. The kind where you feel like an algorithm on the same simple routine-wake up, sleep. I forced myself to eat in order to replenish the hollowed-out cheeks Xanax left me, but spent the rest of the day pathetically haunched over the toilet.

My mother died the following week, in a fire on her quadrant. They sent a short email informing me as well as my small inheritance. I left my house to retrieve it, taking more security measures than last time. The lady sitting across from me slid across the documents along with a few trinkets I needed and hurried me along, her reproachful gaze burning on my skin. I then went to the bank, handing in the papers to the worker. Her eyebrow raised slightly at the sight of my name, then quickly switched back to a neutral expression. She only spoke to repeat the questions on the sheet. The halfhearted condolence she gave when we were finished was returned by my dry smile before pulling my hood up and walking away.

Upon returning home, I quickly realized that there was a break-in, once again. While scanning around my room trying to figure out what was stolen, which I found none, the hinges on the bathroom door squeaked.

Her warm arms wrapped around my stiff limbs, her apologies echoing in and out of my head. The light was now too bright, disorienting me enough to slump down on the bed. She begged for my forgiveness in which I gave, after a week of space. When I did, she told me that she was proud of me for doing the right thing. That people were wrong for treating me like that, and they’ll pay.

She provided explanations for me everyday, more detailed each time. I finally realized maybe the problem is not me, it’s society. We are not the bad guys. Mother doesn’t deserve to go to jail. The world we live in was a cruel and unforgiving place. So everyone should pay for the damage they have done..?

18 of those years I spent erasing myself from my past. Not acknowledging my parents’ existence, letting everyone around me know my hatred towards them. No one ever believed that I could be good, and they are right, maybe I’m not good. But I’m not bad either, all I want is to live a life, a life that they took from me.

Mother’s return seemingly brought the missing pieces of my life back. Murderers, that’s what people told me about my parents, god awful murderers. Like a polaroid photo, only the colorful side got attention, they are more exciting to talk about. It’s the backside of the photo that faces the wall when it gets taped up, because no one cares about it.

It is not an immediate agreement I gave to Mother when she initially confided in me her plan. But there’s nothing for me to lose, the people who never made me feel safe will face justice. That is what everybody needs justice. In the span of one week, she had told me the side I never thought I would hear. Chicago treated us as if we’re peasants, saying nothing when the system did us injustice, and when we finally found the courage to fight back, they silenced us. And in 1925, Chicago Union Station- the land where they killed the first pack protestors-stood for a century, allowing people to step over the memories of the dead. All she needed me to do was to give her the final component she needed in order to start the timer, in which she left the inheritance she wrote a year before my father’s escape along with random trinkets she found to ensure no suspicions.

That’s why we have to destroy the station, to ensure no one will forget the people who walked before us, Mother will bomb it. The plan was laid out months before my birth that was cut short by their arrest, the timed bomb crafted by my father when he escaped still safely concealed within the walls of the station itself, taunting. There’s no better way, there is only one way, but flickers of regret grew fiercer, stronger as the day approached.

The day the station collapsed, I woke up late. The thought of murdering lives catching up to me, the petrified faces of the men, the women, and the children during the last moment of their lives hung around my neck like a ponderous rope, pulling me lower and lower, choking me. How does justice obtained when the cycle is only repeated? There is no right side in a war of slaughter.

Mother had left already, and I was, as she instructed, in the apartment to wait for her return. The clock on the wall read half past 8, with still half an hour left, so I went to save the lives that wouldn’t hesitate to end mine.

The people in the station during rush hour squeezed past each other, shoving their bodies onto each other, making it difficult to breathe. I climbed up the highest spot I could find, an ad screen, already attracting glances.

And so, I begged, I screamed, I yelled. Demanded people to leave the station right now. A look of panic first flared in their eyes, then recognition, finally, blinding hatred. Hardly anyone made their way to the exit, the minority ones who did run for their lives.

This is it, almost nobody believes me.

The clock read eight fifty-nine, just one minute until everyone will die.

There’s no reason for me to try and save myself, who am I to kid? Somehow, someway, the blame will all circulate back to me. It will always be me. Who will you send death threats to when I’m no longer here? Whose house are you going to break into next? Whose pet are you going to kill next? Does this make me a bad person? To give up fighting? So maybe I am the malevolent person society labeled me, maybe all these years of charity is to mask who I truly am – a monster. And I no longer want to care.

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

No one trusted me, that was their final mistake.

Boom.