Fragment

by Akuraito

You were a McCormick, plain and simple, and that alone just about explained how you shouldn't have this power in the first place. It wasn't as if you even had a chance in making it anywhere in this existence, so of course you'd be "blessed" with immortality, of all people. Why would it be any other way?

It was tragic, to sum it up kindly. Your existence, for a lack of a better word, that is. After all, by this point, it seemed as if your heart must be carved from stone, as if apathy must flow throughout your veins rather than blood—well, of course, that wasn't true. You had the pleasure of seeing the blessedly humanblood spout from your wounds more often than you would like, seen the flesh fall from your bones and be replaced almost instantaneously by a well of blood that would spill out onto the harsh ground you stood upon, the dread that would fall upon you as you realized it was happening again, goddammit, why couldn't it just stop—

At this juncture in your thoughts, usually, you wished you could just wash yourself away with a beer, get high, something to distract you from the hellish thoughts you had (it begged the question as to what you'd done to deserve to suffer through hell, regardless of whether or not you were actually dead at the time, but you'd long since ceased trying to get answers out of this fucked up world), or, if you were feeling optimistic, something that could just erase it all from your memory just as it did everyone else. But, of course, that wasn't possible, since god must have forsaken you long ago; and as such, all you could do was crack your face into something that you hoped resembled a smile, which was more than should be expected of you, really. You'd taken more than you could realistically handle since, god, when was it? Third grade?

And yet it just continued throughout your entire existence—pathetic, how couldn't even call it your life—without any sort of break, your deaths. At least they'd lightened up just a little bit since when you were in third grade, a little more sporadic now, but they were far from disappearing. It was old, by now, as if it was routine, but that didn't really stop it from hurting just a little bit each time you opened your eyes to see the ever-so-lovely pits of hell, didn't really stop it from hurting when you had to watch the falsely cheery sunrise each time you were born—sometimes it made you laugh, thinking about how many birthdays you must have by now—again, instead of finally, mercifully letting your body rest in the ground as it should have way back when, the first time you died, which, somehow, you couldn't even remember. It was an odd feeling, one you weren't sure you liked, not being able to discern when your first death was, considering it came with the implication that you couldn't remember the days of your innocence, the days when you didn't know what the feeling of being impaled was like, the days when you'd had no knowledge of what it looked like to see yourself bleeding out to your inevitable death. And, as you realized at some point, you honestly couldn't remember what it was like to have never died. (Sometimes you wondered if whatever ruled over all of this realized that it couldn't break what was already long broken.)

Christ, it wasn't even as if you deserved to have this so-called gift of immortality. (Oh, and how you tried to find a loophole to the whole thing—even if you made it purposeful, calculated, self-inflicted, you just woke up to hell again. Routine. Like the goddamn sunrise. And no matter how much you besought whatever god there was to just let you dissolve and decay, it never worked, as if you'd really had hope in the first place.) You were a McCormick, plain and simple, and that alone just about explained how you shouldn't have this power in the first place. It wasn't as if you even had a chance in making it anywhere in this existence (the only one in your deadbeat family that had any semblance of a shot at life was Karen, or so you hoped), after all, and it almost worked a sort of resigned laugh out of you, how pathetic the whole thing was. Of course you'd be "blessed" with immortality, of all people. Why would it be any other way?

It was even sadder that you had that "gift," given how every aspect of your existence was just a charade. Crack a smile when it was expected. Make an innuendo when there was a chance—maybe you'd work a smile out of someone, be a little worthwhile for once. Pretend to read your textbooks when it was called for. Give every indication that you're mended, as if they'd noticed you had broken in the first place. (Once, you promised, silently, to mend yourself before your next death. But that never did happen.) Or, at least, you did all that sometimes, when the apathy in your veins let up enough for you to have a trickle of concern for reality reach your consciousness. Which wasn't all that often, but, hey, change was the spice of life, wasn't it?

Maybe that was why nothing ever truly changed with you. After all, it seemed as if you'd just keep dying, keep being resurrected with what must be the body and soul of the devil, and, inevitably, everyone would keep neglecting you and your endless deaths as you faded more and more with every day, for who really believes in the fallen Nobody would really want to burden themselves with the dead hearts that so very many people carry, after all, far preferring to simply cast them aside and act as if they didn't exist, purposefully blinding themselves to just how rot the entire world was. At least you could accept how much the world had been blighted. But, of course, that was only really because you'd been forced to your entire existence.

But maybe the lack of change was derived from your inability to believe in anyone or anything. Your hopes had been crushed more times than you'd died due to that very treatment—ironic, wasn't it—and, well, you'd just lost your ability to hope, to have faith. It was rather reminiscent of how your heart lost its humanity and turned to stone instead; there was no reason for it to keep beating, no reason for you to keep trying when all you were destined for was failure, and so, you retired to the monotony of everything and let your heart give in. It begged the question, really: what was the point of "hope" if it was but a whimsical fantasy?

Just another question that could take its place among the plethora of all the other questions you had that were doomed to never find an answer, you supposed. And, somewhere, a small part of you wondered why these questions kept making themselves known when they had to know they'd never be answered.

But in a way, you supposed you could relate to them. The entire point of their existence was null, never to be fulfilled, but they stuck around anyway, always stirring at the outskirts of everyone's minds. Just like how you would inevitably come back to haunt everyone no matter the circumstances, even when you logically shouldn't exist: an inexplicable, pointless nuisance that would never quite disappear. What a perfect allegory for your existence.

And that, that thought alone, terrified you far more than you'd like to admit: that you were someone who would never quite disappear. That there was a possibility that you'd never have the gratification of resting in whatever afterlife awaited everyone else. Considering that you always received a new body, one with fresh, unaged organs, who was to say you could die of old age, given that your physical age was rendered moot with each death you experienced?

For all you knew, as the years went by—and this, this was when the fear really settled into your bones—and you continued your existence, everyone you ever knew would die, and you'd be the sole survivor. Watching them, one by one, succumb to their mortality as you remained youthful and new as ever, never permanently dying, always having a fresh body, even as everything and everyone became dilapidated until it was all but a memory, something you would forget in time, as if none of it truly mattered.

And in that you found the one thing that could somehow fragment you further: the thought that the world could end, and yet, you would still exist, never quite disappearing as everything else in existence had.