The library became something I didn’t expect. It became a parallel structure. A place where reality followed different rules, where pain had direction, where suffering meant something, where it led to somewhere.
I moved through the shelves slowly, the same way I moved through rooms. There was one book that I didn’t understand fully at first, but something about it stayed with me. It was worn, the edges of the pages softened from use. The title was simple.
The Count of Monte Cristo.
At twelve, I didn’t read it the way an adult would. I didn’t care about historical accuracy or political nuance.
What I saw was a man. Wronged, buried, stripped of everything, and then… patient. Calculating. Becoming something new and not just surviving what was done to him, but rebuilding himselfinto something capable of answering it completely, thoroughly, and without mercy.
I read it again.
And again.
And again.
Because I saw something in it, something valuable.
The idea that suffering could be repurposed, that time could be used, that silence wasn’t just absence but preparation. That became important. More important than anything else at that time, because for the first time in my life, I wasn’t just enduring something, I was beginning to understand that it could be used.
The Deterioration
Chapter 9
When every day is about survival, your sense of time starts to collapse.
Days stopped feeling like separate things; they blurred together into a stretch of existence where the only thing that marked time was repetition, and repetition has a way of changing meaning.
The first time something happens, it shocks you.
The second time, you question it.
The third, you begin to expect it.
By the time I turned thirteen, there was no longer a question ofif.Onlywhen?And eventually,how often?
It didn’t stay contained to the night. At some point, without announcement, the boundary dissolved. Afternoons began to carry the same dread as evenings. The same pressure beneath the surface. The same sense that something would unfold regardless of whether I was ready for it or not. Routine expanded.
What used to be something that waited for darkness started existing in daylight, and that changes a person in ways that are difficult to explain.
Because night lets you pretend things belong to a different version of reality. Daylight doesn’t offer that. Daylight forces everything into the same world where you eat, breathe, move, and exist. There’s no separation, just… continuity. And when something becomes continuous, it stops feeling like an event and becomes an environment instead.
By fourteen, I no longer reacted the way I used to.
My mind had begun to reorganize itself. There are only so many ways a body can respond before it starts choosing efficiency over resistance.
I stopped anticipating it as something external; instead it became internal.
A constant state rather than a moment.
My thoughts changed. They moved slower, but cut deeper.
There were long stretches of time where I felt like I was observing myself from a distance. Watching my own movements the same way I used to watch other people. Detached. As if I had become another environment to study. My body didn’t feel like mine anymore, not in the way it used to. It was… accessible, available. Something that existed for use rather than ownership, and that realization didn’t come with panic; it came with something far worse.
Acceptance.
It was a Friday when the familiar routine broke.
The afternoon had felt no different from any other.
