apostasy
when i was younger i told myself i’d either rack up a body count of five hundred novels before treacherous twenty or i’d give up paper cuts and bleeding ink and find more suitable ways to pluck trembling teeth. it wasn’t going to make me a genius. i knew that. but it was going to scare my father, how i could become anybody i wanted.
i assumed most parents fear that their children might one day grow to be cannibals, so i was determined to gobble shit up, right. i’m sure everyone is nodding their heads in assent. yes.
back to cannibalism. at an age before all i did was avoid the dentist, the only thing it meant was that you consumed whatever made you tick the most. such as the setting sun. such as dusk, your mother’s singing and puff, the magic dragon. such as fa mulan in the 1998 animated musical adventure film, mulan. such as the monster in your closet with your prying eyes and your sunken heart and your dislocated pinky. such as the endless howling of a man responsible for a third of your birth.
at some point, the medium ceased to matter. i swallowed hundreds with a belly full of cold flame fury. i was going to eat every word ever spoken or put to pen. i was going to defy death at a great distance. turn my gut into a fireplace where all blasphemy goes to burn. out of barren soil and cracks in the concrete i was going to take all the terrible, timely, taboo and spit it at his feet.
i was, also, coincidentally— sixteen.
we grow up, theoretically, as the years lay behind us in ratty, dogged sleeping bags, but in no greater instance than the act of consumption. i grew out of a diet better made for wolves in the space of a single character. i learned to let go the way all sixteen year olds learn to let go: i fell in love with a boy trembling, warped in his ire. for all he denied it, the spitting image of his father.
(they say a flower cannot choose the field where it blooms, but what of the seed from which its body emerges? everybody has always said we’ve looked alike. once upon a time, that i was just like you. you, who yelled for the lights i hadn’t left on, who swore if i so much as shook in my sleep. was it wrong to wonder if you ever realized how small i used to be, and how big your voice seemed? was it so terrible to resent you for all i’d been made to eat?)
about mine: he was old at thirty-five, all tremor-wrought and stout enough to fill in his trousers. he didn’t have to try to scare me then. now young again at fifty-eight he frightens me most in the quiet. in the fleeting half-lucid moments he’ll look down at the only pair of loafers he owns and tell me i’m free to do whatever i want with my life, no matter how much he grinds his soles in contempt. no matter how much he’s dug his heels in my ticking.
i know he’s only saying this because he’s scared his heart will stop beating. i’m horrified to find i’m scared his heart will stop beating. every so often i feel sick with acrid attachment and bitter respect. on days he isn’t hungry, or cannot stomach our slightly-overcooked rice grains— he is less my father and more an old man.
this has run on for much longer than i expected, but in hindsight, opening your mouth is what cannibalism trains one to do. i guess all i’m trying to say is that you didn’t ruin me. dad, i’m the biggest, baddest, good thing in the room: after all, i’ve become the kind of person who forgives you.
002: todoroki shouto: origin as a means of therapy - it feels very wrong to be like wow i ate him and it healed something in me but that's exactly what happened.