I Am Demisekind - April 9th, 2023

I am demisekind.

Touched by the Book. Tricked by the Fox. Thrown into a Game that is not meant to be won.

I am tired, very much so, of surface-level understanding.

Tired of words stolen and toyed with.

To myself, internally, I hold words that are my own, in hopes they are not taken from me.

Boring, I hope; too serious, harder to warp into a mockery of what they once were, touching on too specific of an aspect of what we went through in that world.

Does the demise game really end?

Sometimes I feel that building dread; like I will be given my letter, soon. Like the book will appear, soon, and with it, the bookmark with the black cat, marking the page of my doom.

I am a black cat, too, and I wonder, was I marked by the book?

Am I, a participant in the Game, part of the book myself?

Did I pay enough with my death?

We were given a week, and everything happened in the final days. Just as was planned. Because a week is generous; given the types who summon the book, everything was always doomed to fall apart quicker than that.

And fall apart it did.

I am demisekind.

In a world so close and yet not mine, always passing ghosts of what I used to know, I read my source with a heaviness.

I cannot think too deeply on it, as I am prone to, or I realize too much; how much we really lost, how deep we really were, how the Game was always meant to happen.

Maybe that’s the fault of our scriptwriters, or maybe we took on a life of our own, characters made by characters in a chain of fiction, and here we are still.

“Why did you do this to us?”—It would be the silliest of questions to ask, wouldn’t it?

We are characters. Just characters, just characters, and we were always doomed to die, and so were they.

That ties all of us together. Our forever-bad-end.

And now, here I am.

I am demisekind.

The book, the bookmark, the letter, the demands, interest-gone-wrong and affection-gone-wrong and denial, and here we are, still aching.

That familiarity is gone.

We asked for it to be.

The mundanity, the days we spent together, the old classroom and our designated chairs and the stories we told together, are all gone.

We asked for them to be.

A deep, bone-hurting ache of what we didn’t appreciate, and will never see again.

We will never be what we were before the Game. Not in that world, this world, any world where we Remember.

A lesson, and a punishment for being written into the tale.

And here we stay.

I am demisekind.