Through imagination. But not fantasy in the childish sense. Not dragons, not heroes. It was order.
I built inner worlds where nothing happened by accident. Where every gesture meant something, and no affection was withdrawn without warning.
I think, looking back, I was less interested in love and more interested in predictability. That may be the sadder confession.
At night I would lie awake rehearsing scenes I had never lived. As if precision itself could make them real. That impulse stayed with me longer than the orphanage did.
The self-inflicted pain escalated. At first, it frightened me. The first time I scratched my forearm until the skin broke, the bloodstartled me so badly I hid my hand under the blanket as if someone might catch me doing something shameful. But the body adapts. It adapts to hunger, cold, and humiliation. It adapted to that too.
After a while, it became almost procedural, something I returned to with the same secrecy as prayer.
At night, when the other boys were asleep, and the room was thick with breathing, I would sit upright in bed and press my nails into the side of my thigh, dragging them up and down. Hard, then harder, until the sting overran the ache in my chest.
I could not have explained that ache, only that it seemed to sit there constantly, pressing inward. Pain interrupted it, and sometimes that was enough.
What I think drew me back was not suffering itself but the reply.
Pain answered when the world often did not. Press hard enough, and the body responds. It tells you you’re there. For a child who often felt half-erased, that mattered more than anything else.
There were nights I watched the marks fade over days and felt a kind of panic when they disappeared, as though evidence was being taken from me. That is ugly to confess, but true. Those scratches were proof that something had happened to me, even if no one else would ever see it. They made what was inward feel briefly locatable.
The strangest part was how ordinary it became. Not some grand gesture of despair. Just a boy in a narrow bed trying to quiet something he could not carry alone. It was small, repetitive, fuck, almost mundane. But that is how suffering often enters a life.
I remember one winter, the window in our room wouldn’t close. Cold slipped through the frame and settled into everything. Blankets held nothing back. You woke up with it in your joints. I remember pulling the thin blanket tighter around me and staring up at the cracked ceiling for so long that the cracks beganto look familiar, almost arranged.
By then, I had started talking to myself, though not aloud. More like a second current running under thought. A voice that seemed steadier than I was. Older, perhaps. It would narrate things to me in moments I could not manage alone.
This is temporary. This will make sense later. Pay attention. You are learning something.
Strange comforts for a child, maybe. But they steadied me. I don’t know where that voice came from. Maybe I made it because I needed someone in the room who was not frightened. Maybe it was only the mind doing what minds do when left too long without tenderness. I only know it kept me company.
By eight, the self-harm had escalated. I knew where to injure myself without it showing in short sleeves.
I knew how to angle my body so no one would see me flinch. I knew you could cry without making noise if you timed it right.
Strange knowledge for a child, but children acquire the knowledge required of them. You would think someone would notice, but orphanages are ecosystems of triage where the loudest pain gets treated first, and I was quiet.
Quiet enough to slip below urgency. Quiet enough to be mistaken for fine.
There was a boy two beds down from mine who sobbed into his pillow every night for months. A raw, muffled sound, as if he was trying to swallow grief and failing. No one came. No one ever came. And then eventually he stopped.
That frightened me more than the crying, because stopping is worse.
Crying means something in you is still reaching outward. Stopping can mean that part has gone under. I think that was where detachment began taking a firmer hold. Or where I first noticed it.
I stopped attaching myself to the possibility of being chosen.Stopped counting how many children left each year. Stopped wondering whether someone out there might regret something. You can only keep extending hope toward silence for so long before some part of you withdraws its hand.
The inner world became preferable.
At times, it felt more solid than the one around me. I would sit cross-legged on my bed in the middle of the day and stare at my hands for long stretches, turning them slightly, moving my fingers one at a time, watching tendons pull beneath the skin as if I were studying evidence. Proof. I exist. Though even that could feel theoretical, which is a strange thing for a child to suspect about himself.
There was a period when I became almost preoccupied with contact. Anything that answered back. One afternoon during outdoor hours, a boy shoved me from behind, hard enough that I lurched forward but kept my feet. I turned, expecting a second push, maybe even wanting one. Hoping for one, if I’m honest.
But he only stared at me, almost puzzled.
“Freak, you don’t even react,”he said.
I remember not knowing what to do with that. Because he was right. I didn’t react. Not in the way he meant. Reacting requires some investment in the moment, some belief that it actually matters.
