Emotional detachment
Absence of remorse
Controlled physiological responses to discussion of the offense
May indicate an elevated risk profile, particularly in contexts where the subject perceives provocation or loss of control.
8. CONCLUSION
At present, the subject cannot be deemed suitable for a treatment-based judicial measure due to insufficient data resulting from non-cooperation.
Further evaluation is recommended should the subject become responsive.
Until such time, the subject should be considered psychologically opaque, with behavioral indicators suggesting controlled affect and limited external emotional expression.
Evaluator Signature:
Dr. Michal Kaczmarek
The Dissociation
Chapter 42
Six months had passed.
I only know that because someone told me. Could’ve been less. Could’ve been more. Time inside that place stopped feeling connected to anything real after a while. The lights turned on. The lights turned off. Food got shoved through the slot in the door. Voices came and went. Sometimes people touched me before speaking to make sure I was paying attention. Sometimes they repeated my name enough times that it stopped sounding like mine.
After enough time in a place like that, your body stops waiting for permission from the rest of you. It wakes up. Eats when food appears. Lies down when the lights go out. Survives automatically while your head drifts farther and farther away from it. I think that realization did something to me. The understanding that a human being can get used to almost anything if you trap them with it long enough. Even this. Even becoming something that sits in silence for hours staring at concrete walls without feeling the need to move.
One hour doesn’t feel like anything, then suddenly a week is gone and you don’t remember a single moment of it, just the feeling of sitting there, breathing, existing in a space that doesn’t want you.
They kept me in isolation.
A small room, concrete on every side, the kind that held onto cold even when it shouldn’t, like the walls themselves had memory, like they remembered everyone who had been locked inside them before me and decided to keep a piece of it. There was a narrow bed bolted into the floor, a thin mattress that neverreally softened no matter how long I lay on it, a metal toilet in the corner and a small slit of a window too high up to look out of unless I stood on the edge of the bed and strained my neck just to catch a piece of sky. I didn’t do that often, but the sky didn’t feel like it belonged to me anymore.
Most days, the only movement came when they opened the door to take me out to the yard. One hour, same time, every day. A routine so predictable it almost felt cruel, like they were reminding me that even my freedom was scheduled, handed out in controlled doses. They walked me there in silence, always the same hallway, the same sound of boots against the floor, the same echo bouncing off the walls like it had nowhere else to go. Some of them looked at me the way you’d look at something you didn’t quite trust to stay still, something that might bite if you got too close. Others didn’t look at me at all, like I wasn’t even worth the effort.
They made me see the psychologist again, a few times, scattered across those months like it was supposed to change anything. Like if they placed me in a room often enough with someone trained to understand broken things, something inside me would eventually crack open in the right way.
Idiots.
I sat across from him in room after room that all looked exactly the same, the same metal chair under me, the same table separating us while he kept talking. His voice always carried that careful tone people use when they think one wrong word might make someone shut down completely, but I still gave him nothing back.
You remember I told you, little Ghost, how I used to disappear when I was a kid? Slip inward, build something inside, something better than the world I had been put in. A place where things made sense. Where I could breathe without waiting forsomething to hit me, or take something from me, or twist me into something I didn’t want to be. This wasn’t that anymore. Whatever part of me used to reach for comfort had already burned out a long time ago. What was left felt colder and meaner than that. It wasn’t a refuge, it wasn’t even a place.
It was more like being locked in a room with everything I had ever tried not to look at and having the door sealed behind me so I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there.
Violence didn’t come and go, it stayed. It sat in my chest, in my throat, in the back of my fucking skull, constant and humming, turning over the same thoughts again and again until they stopped feeling like thoughts and started feeling like something darker.
You know what they do when something is made wrong?
They pretend it wasn’t made at all. They call it a mistake, a defect, but I was and still am whattheybuilt. Every hand that touched me, every voice that shaped me, every silence that swallowed me whole, this was the result. Filth doesn’t create something clean, it never has and it never will.
And the grief, God, the grief didn’t leave.
There’s a special kind of pain that doesn’t ask to be released, a kind that doesn’t want out, it wants to stay and after a while, you stop trying to remove it. Instead, you start feeding it. The psychologist would sit there, watching me, waiting, trying to find some entry point, some crack in the silence he could slip through and I could see it in his face sometimes. That moment where he realized he wasn’t talking to someone who wanted to be understood. I didn’t want help, actually, I didn’t want anything. That’s worse, I think. Because when you stop wanting, when even survival stops feeling urgent, something changes. Something fundamental. You stop being a person moving toward something and become static. Stuck, rotting in place.
Madness isn’t always loud, you know, sometimes it’s just the absence of anything else. Sometimes it’s what happens when fear doesn’t have anywhere to go, when grief doesn’t have an endpoint, when everything that should have broken you doesn’t, stays instead warping everything it touches. And at some point, you stop asking whether you’re becoming something worse and instead start asking whether you should.
