Published: October 25, 2007

I am a cold-blooded killer who asks for forgiveness. It is salvation that I seek.

The dead quiet of night, this noiseless noise, the emptiness is all that remains. It is in the beauty of silence that I try to find comfort, for my soul is burning. The joy that would have been, the laughter that would have rolled off his tongue is now replaced by echoing silence.

I can hear his soundless scream, begging for a chance to see the infinite skies and taste the sweetness of laughter, but I refused. I refused on the grounds that it’s not yet time for him. A mistake, I called him. The pang of regret is strong in me.

It is not long ago that I encountered what at first seemed like a profound message in a form of a sticker on a struggling lady’s refrigerator, “Life is a bitch, and then you die,” it read simply. You beat your soul black and blue only to make others happy; you work so hard to reach their expectations but it’s never good enough. And what’s the point? Living is self-mutilation; you do it because it’s the only thing you know how to do. Like faulty machines we operate until we break.

But the scenario changes when what you expect to happen does not take place. Instead of dying some nameless death, I became a killer, robbing an innocent being of his opportunity for a better life. Is it not the unspoken expectation, that a child should have a better life than that of his parents? But I did not expect that of him and he could not ask.

His name would have been Gregory, or maybe Alexander, if he did have the chance. He might have grown up here in this small town of ghosts, or probably move one day to one of those great Northern cities of freedom, New York or Boston. It is difficult to tell what his future would have brought; nonetheless, happiness is a possibility even for a fatherless son, is it not?

And now my hands are bloody, and it is my own blood. And menstrual pains don’t faze me anymore, a sign of life so distant just like the faint beating of my heart. The day my womb emptied is a day we both died, a mother and son.

I think of him and his life that never was, and in my heart know that I’m a killer. A creator of good I could have been, but blindfolded with the devil I decided to go.