Chapter Seven: The Kingdom of a Lonely Boy ---Fragments of a Dissociative Universe---

 

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.

In that solitude, I dreamed of escape. I saw myself older, a hermit living deep in the woods, free from everything. But even those fantasies collapsed under the weight of reality, the thought of a Canadian winter, of a cold so profound it could steal a man’s life in days. Freedom, it seemed, was a place I could never reach.

It was a strange sort of liberty I had no one to stop me from doing anything, yet no one who would notice if I simply ceased to exist. The depression dug its trenches deep. I would hide in corners or behind closed doors, crying without a sound, wishing myself away. My mind became a landscape of thoughts no child should ever have to navigate. Loneliness was no longer just a feeling; it was a prison I carried in my chest, a cell with walls made of my own ribs.

The house itself was a stage for a different kind of violence. My mother's boyfriend, the man she had allowed into our lives, lingered like a ghost of tension. I had seen them fight before, seen her kick him out, his belongings thrown across the yard only for him to slither back days later. But one day, the tension finally snapped. Their fight boiled over, and I saw something in my mother I had never witnessed, a rage that eclipsed everything else. She ran after him with a kitchen knife clutched in her hand, her face a mask of pure fury. This wasn't a bluff. ...For the first time, she looked as if she truly wanted blood. 

I saw it then. I saw that the capacity to kill wasn't something foreign. It was in our family. It was in us. He escaped only because he was faster.., but the image burned itself into me, a permanent scar on my memory. It was the only time I saw her lose all control, and it terrified me to my core.

That was the world I inhabited: a landscape of silence, neglect, and loneliness, punctuated by sudden eruptions of chaos. A childhood kingdom built not on play and laughter, but on desperation and fear. And even then, buried deep inside that hollow place, a part of me was already searching for a vision, some glimpse of another way to exist, another identity to claim that would finally carry me away.

Chapter 8: The Thirty-Second Prophet