Pain is world-annihilating. In a moment of anticipation and the echo of grotesque, otherworldly sounds in a room that should be perfectly gentrified, you become prey to it. I have felt it push me to the brink of death and catapult me back to the base of my very existence. It evoked in me a monster...the very essence of my being. It injected in me the violent need to survive—even if it meant that I had to eat the flesh of similarly tortured beings… even if it meant I had to gorge on the flesh of an innocent creature whose sentience had yet to grow pronounced. Pain instilled in me Reason. There is only one: You only have hope when you survive.
Pain also produces the vision of reality; it gave me an idea of how to search for meaning beyond what was already assigned to me through predestination. It also taught me that pain was only felt by whose bodies were inflicted by it, never by those who looked on. It taught me that empathy was a myth. Pain shuns the outside world—it is unexplainable in language and only expressible in pre-linguistic communication—through sound.
In my journey of trying to find a suitable representation of pain I have learned various languages and looked at various forms of pain inflicted on unsuspecting victims in real-life. I have tried to find the reason for the infliction of such inhumanity, but never truly understood the pain of those that I was looking at. I was never able to understand or empathize with the pain of others because I only felt what it had done to me.
My pain.
Not anyone else's.
And therefore, my journey continues.
Today, though, I have taken it upon myself to give you a taste of who I am—what my pains are (even if I do not expect you to know why I am), but first I will start with my primary identifiers—the identifications I had been given on birth.
Sex-Female
Name- Evie Marie Lewis
Both of these, I had no control over. Neither did I have control over who my parents were, the color of my eyes, the way I looked, or my religion. Hence, even though I have provided you with this information, I would beg you to look beyond it and remember me through my actions and the choices I made and the circumstances I was in—they might be psychologically and sociologically stimulated, but they were still not choices that were made for me before I had the right to choose for myself.
Let's start over, shall we?
Hello. I am Evie Marie Lewis. Female. And this is how I came to exist.
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I grew up in a big city, in a loving family. I had no trauma to speak of, just unconditional love provided to me by my parents and grandparents. My mother was a blessing to mankind, selfless and hopelessly in love with my father. She was also a high school biology teacher who believed in positively influencing students and encouraging creativity and curiosity in their work. But what I remember most about her is how proud she was of my father and me, for wanting to protect society at large.
Yes, I was an idealist as a child, and I blame it on my father.
My father was almost the opposite of my mother. He was cold and calculating and he looked at nothing but facts and statistics, something that helped him as a detective. The contrast between the couple was so comic that almost no one believed that they would end up together in the long run.
At home, they never mentioned their jobs. They fought, but only behind closed doors and always went to bed after resolving their problems. Best of all, they showered me with books and sources of knowledge that they hoped would help me shape myself—to understand what my calling was. I found that I liked solving puzzles and helping my father with cases.
By the time I was fourteen my father proudly introduced me as a future co-worker of his and taught me how to protect myself.
That day, we were celebrating my grandfather's sixty-seventh birthday. My father seemed oddly out of the conversations taking place and my mother was equally distressed about something. Chalking it up to an argument, I found myself joking with the grandparents and helping prepare dinner.
Something unusual happened that day, and now that I reflect on it, I realize how seriously my mother must have been affected by that news to discuss dad's work affairs at home and in such a loud voice.
"Charlie, she threatened to kill your family if you didn't stop looking for her," I heard my mother's angry voice coming from my parent's room. It made me stagger. It wasn't unusual for Dad to get threats, but mom's reaction was what had stunned me. She always encouraged my father to pursue cases, yet there she was, infuriated that he wasn't stopping.
"Luna... I can't. I know I can protect you!" I smiled as I moved away from the spot.
They would figure out their problems, I assured myself and went back to whatever I was doing, I don't exactly remember what.
I had never feared that someone would harm us because we had Dad. Who would dare to stake their life to harm one of Charlie Lewis's loved ones? I went to sleep feeling safe and sound every night of those sixteen years.
That night I woke up feeling the need to relieve myself.
The thing about older houses is that... it settles. As a child, I had believed that little noises were caused due to paranormal entities, but as I grew older and more comfortable with my home, I realized that a small step on a loose spot could produce a sound from another part of the room. Sometimes vibrations from another room could make it sound like the door was rattling. Therefore, despite my upbringing, I almost always ignored the light sounds emanating from the house.
I couldn't tell the difference between the groans of the foundation of the house and the infrequent padding of footsteps and creaking of doors. Maybe, I was sleepy... maybe I was too comfortable with the identity of my parents and the security that nothing bad could ever happen to me. I was stupid enough to ignore statistical figures showing the number of crimes taking place on a regular basis.
Knowing my father as a light sleeper, I had always found a way to make the least bit of noise as I moved. As I locked the bathroom door behind me, I felt my heart start to pound. There was nothing amiss in the situation, just a sudden bout of adrenaline rushing through my veins for no particular reason.
The curious thing about human understanding of situations is very similar to Wordsworth poetic theory—"emotion recollected in tranquillity". As I closed my eyes to relieve myself, I remembered the moment my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the hallway. I had looked down to the first floor momentarily before rushing to the washroom, but I had seen a solitary figure on the corner of the stair. The stillness was almost mechanic and in the darkness, indistinguishable from the architecture.
Breath heaving and eyes gaping at nothing, I sat there for a long time.
'As a rational human being— one who is trained to defend themselves, what should I have done at that moment,' I wondered.
Unable to answer that question, I just sat there, trying to gauge the amount of time it would take the dark figure to make their way up the stairs without making a noise. I tried to figure out what their motive would be because for the life of me I could not imagine a robber trying to break into one of Chicago's top detectives' home.
"Charlie, she threatened to kill your family if you didn't stop looking for her," it replayed in my head over and over again. She was going to kill us.
I stared at the locked door and wondered how long it would take her to come to me.
My grandparents never locked their door and it was right in front of where the staircase met the hallway. She would probably go into that room first.
They were deep sleepers. They would not wake-
*thud*
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