This is not happening.

This is not your body, picking up a .45 from the floor where it's still spinning. You didn't kick a man's feet from under him. You are not pinning him to the floor. You don't press the hard unyielding bone of your knee into his back. You don't hear vertebrae crunch under your weight.

You don't pull a trigger.

It's not you who remains silent, standing up and scanning the room with dark eyes, mechanical and efficient. It's not your hands pocketing the warm, slightly greasy gun. It's not your feet carrying you to the locker in the wall of this room.

You don't feel the cold slide of disappointment down your throat at the sight of empty shelves.

(What you feel is relief, a welcome wash of warmth around you, or whatever remains of you, in the passenger seat, shamefully clinging to any sort of victory, even if only conspired into being by others outsmarting your body's driving force, leaving you nearly breathless, metaphorically or perhaps just metaphysically, if your existence at the moment even amounts to that—you are not sure, still at odds with your captivity, so unlike anything else and ultimately indescribable.)

You are not angry.

Your body isn't doing this. You're not picking up a woman's lifeless form, coldly cataloguing the reddened skin of her ankles and wrists and her blackened neck. You don't haul her over your shoulder with practised ease. You don't carry her to the bathroom where a bathtub, a saw, and a roll of clear plastic are waiting.

(What you're doing is despairing, voicelessly wailing into a void that would carry no sound even if you made it, desperate to close your eyes—which do not exist anymore, for you—to still your hands—just outside of reach, like your nerves have been blocked, as if you're on the cusp of being released from the clutches of sleep paralysis—yes, you remember that—desperate at your own incapabilities, at not being able to stop every sight and sound.)

You are not satisfied with a job completed. You do not smile.

You don't yield to your carnal desires.

It's not you that is gripped by a sudden need for relief, or a wish to celebrate, at random intervals or triggered by a lucky streak.

You do not trawl dingy watering holes for the company of barely conscious, almost-willing bodies. You do not pay for the services of a young woman when you're in a generous mood. You do not stalk high school girls in towns you pass by.

(You still despair at this, even after an eternity has passed by, and your emotions have become something worn, like they ran out when you'd consumed your memory of bodily autonomy and turned to consuming the memory of feelings, instead, carding through them until they started to fray—if you could remember what it's like to run your fingertips over cloth, a tie, the lapel of a suit, flannel, anything, you'd say it was like that, but you can't—and so you do not know whether you really feel anything or whether it's just out of habit, an abstract sense of decorum you cling to because there is nothing else left for you to call human, not in this time out of mind—)

You do not enjoy the parting of flesh, the give of soft tissue under skin softer still, the way the bodies under you open up and resist and invite. You do not like the way the skin under your hand blossoms white, then red, fascinatingly universal across bodies of all shape and size.

You do not sleep well.

You are not slipping.

It's not you feeling a net closing in around you. You do not summon powers beyond your own abilities. It's not you cutting off yet another piece of this vessel, forming it into a shadow of a shadow.

(You are, at this point, surely, beyond any emotions, but what goes through you is nearly hope, or perhaps just satisfaction at your body's owner's failures, his having to fashion a third-generation copy of you that almost blurs at the edges, made mostly out of your weaknesses—the final manifestation of your humanity—and his faltering, like ropes around you easing ever so slightly, knots not up to the standards of the Boy Scouts.)

You do not lose whatever it is that was still concealing your true self.

You are not caught. It's not your plan that's gone awry, not your body convulsing with the onslaught of the poisonous essence of your past selves. This pain and suffering isn't yours.

This is not you giving a thumbs up.

(What you're doing is not unlike burning—it is hard to find a way to describe things in any other way, anymore—alight at the arrival of your King and Knight and Queen, familiar and unfamiliar at turns beyond the glass; you burn for them to look and see, not this body that isn't you or yours, but what remains of you, shattered and ground into dust, slowly running through the fingers of time and space; you know that somewhere there is a body waiting for you, an empty vessel, mind out of time—)

This is not you, preparing for a battle you cannot afford to win.