Fragments of a Dissociative Universe

  Summer 1990. The air was thick with the promise of something new, an era of new opportunities. I was eleven, turning twelve, standing on the shaky precipice between childhood and whatever came next. The world felt like it was opening up, but for me, it was an opening I was about to fall through. As a kid evolving into a teenager, I had already left the small-time economies of marbles and sports cards behind. High school loomed on the horizon, a vast, unknown territory. But instead of rising to meet it, the floor fell out from under me with a sudden, sickening lurch. It began with the geographical and emotional rupture of moving from L'Acadie to a sterile, unfamiliar apartment in St-Luc. The new walls didn't echo with memory; they just felt empty. This was the bleak backdrop for my mother introducing her new boyfriend—and trust me, you will hear way more about that useless dumbfuck. Everyone who knew him understood he was a pathetic loser—a serial cheater and a thief whose cha...

Before the drugs, before the streets swallowed me whole, I was already learning the architecture of survival. My first economy was marbles. What began as a child’s game quickly mutated into a primer on power. My friend and I engineered a betting table, a board with holes of varying sizes. The smaller the aperture your marble conquered, the greater your winnings. We had turned play into a system of gain, a microcosm of extraction. But beneath the commerce pulsed a raw, desperate need to belong. Each transaction was a futile knock on a door I knew was locked, a child’s hope that the right price might finally purchase entry. The older I grew, the more the truth solidified: I was an outsider trading with natives, learning their language but never earning a passport. The realization was complete: I was different. An outcast. It didn’t come as a surprise, more as a cold, final confirmation. I didn't accept it, not really... but I began to learn how to live with it, to build a life ar...

Most kids my age named astronauts or firefighters when you asked them what they wanted to be. I always said I wanted to be an inventor, a maker of things, someone who could fix or build and change the world with his hands. From what I remember, when I was young I already had a logical way of reasoning that rejected what I couldn't see or verify. I was an overthinker, turning simple things over in my mind until they became complex. The origins of eggs and honey, for instance, weren’t just facts but puzzles that felt vaguely unsettling. Where did eggs really come from? The process seemed messy and invasive. And honey? It was bee vomit, a fact I found both fascinating and deeply unappetizing. That same literal hunger for truth led me to demand my mother remove me from Catholic classes right after kindergarten, finding the stories unconvincing and the rules arbitrary. Years later, that thread of questioning would push me toward vegetarianism, another refusal to accept things at face v...

  By the time I was nine, loneliness had become my shadow, my closest companion. My mother, a woman navigating her own scarred past, had let a silence grow between us until our words were few and far between. I had an older brother, though he was never a brother to me, the guardian who offered no protection, the companion who offered no comfort. We shared no closeness. The dislike between us was a quiet, mutual pact, and so the evenings I spent alone became the rule, not the exception. Our mobile home was a small island, its thin walls no match for the endless percussion of the nearby gun range. The shots came like clockwork, day bleeding into night, their reports rattling through the hollow rooms. In that space, I was the sole ruler of an empty kingdom, a child with no one to answer to. The silence inside was a heavy blanket, punctured only by the steady, violent rhythm from outside… a twisted lullaby that wrapped itself around my bones until I grew to hate the very sound of it. I...

  I was eight or nine years old, and for once, life gave me a stage where I wasn’t the outcast. It was the day of our class ice-skating trip. For most kids, it was just another field trip. For me, it was a chance to shine. On the ice, I wasn’t the quiet boy in the corner, the loner with sadness stitched into him. I was good at skating. My body knew the rhythm of the blades, the way to lean into the cold and turn it into grace. For once, I had something my classmates could admire. The rink was alive with sound, the scrape of steel on ice, the laughter of kids pushing off too fast, the distant echo of teachers calling half-hearted instructions. My breath clouded in the air as I sped forward, weightless, the cold wind carving against my face. For a rare moment, I felt free, almost untouchable. Then it happened. A flash, a slip, a brutal snap from joy to horror. I went down hard. The world didn’t just tilt, it detonated. Pain exploded through my skull, white-hot and electric, as if...

  It was Halloween night. I was six or seven years old, just another kid with a cheap costume and a bag that grew heavier with each door we hit. The streets smelled like wet leaves and wax from half burned candles, the cold air sharp against my face as I ran from house to house with the others. My friend’s older sister trailed behind us, a reluctant teenage chaperone half distracted by her own thoughts, but close enough to pass for safety. That year, adults had only just begun whispering about “stranger danger.” To us, though, the world still felt mostly harmless, sugar coated by the thrill of free candy and the rush of running through the dark. And then the car appeared. It slid into our orbit slow and deliberate, too slow for a night where everything else was chaotic and fast. The headlights cut across the pavement, washing over our little group. The car rolled up beside us and stopped. I was the closest. The driver’s door opened with a dull metallic click. He didn’t get out. Ins...