I was sixteen years old when the Jedi murdered my parents.
There are more dignified ways to phrase it.
I could say that they died during the pacification of Veykar Prime. I could call it an assault, an operation, a purge, or any of the other bloodless words historians use to make murder easier to place inside an archive.
I could say that Kerath was destroyed.
I could say that my people were exterminated.
All of those statements would be true.
None of them would tell you that my mother had been making breakfast.
She stood beside the kitchen counter with her sleeves rolled above her elbows, her hair tied back so it would not fall into her face. There was flour on one cheek. A small white streak she had not noticed, and which neither my father nor I had bothered to mention because we were waiting to see how long it would take her to discover it herself.
My father sat at the table, complaining about the weather.
It was a cold morning, even for Kerath. Frost had formed along the corners of the windows, and the mountains beyond Lake Serik were little more than dark shapes behind the falling snow. My father claimed he could feel another storm coming in his left knee. My mother told him his left knee predicted a storm whenever he wanted an excuse to remain inside.
He said a wise mechanic listened to his machinery.
She said a wise mechanic replaced defective parts.
I laughed.
That is the last sound I remember from before my childhood ended.
My father had promised I could come to the garage with him that day. There was a damaged heating assembly waiting for us, pulled from one of the houses near the northern path. He intended to show me how to rebuild the regulator rather than simply replace it.
He always believed things deserved the chance to be repaired.
Machines. Homes. Friendships. People.
"If it can still tell you where it hurts," he used to say, "then it is not beyond saving."
I believed him.
At sixteen, I believed my father knew everything worth knowing.
I wanted hands like his. Scarred, strong, permanently stained with grease no amount of scrubbing could completely remove. I wanted to understand machines by touch. I wanted to hear a failing engine and know which part was suffering. I wanted a garage of my own someday, perhaps beside his, where the people of Kerath would bring me the things they could not mend themselves.
That was the entirety of my ambition.
I did not dream of power.
I did not dream of vengeance.
I did not know enough of the galaxy to hate it.
Then the sky opened.
The first explosion was distant. The walls trembled, and a few dishes rattled inside the cupboard.
My mother stopped moving.
My father looked toward the window.
There was another impact, closer this time. Somewhere outside, an alarm began to sound.
I remember feeling excited.
That is one of the memories I hate most.
I had never heard the settlement alarm used for anything but drills. I thought perhaps a transport had crashed in the storm. I thought my father and I might be needed. I imagined following him into the snow with our tools, helping him repair something important while frightened people watched.
Then someone began screaming outside.
My father rose so quickly that his chair struck the floor.
The third explosion shattered a window.
My mother pulled me down before the glass reached us. It sprayed across the kitchen, scattering over the table, the floor, and the breakfast she had been preparing. The room filled with snow and smoke.
My father crawled toward the window.
I can still see his face when he looked outside.
My father was not easily frightened. Machines sometimes exploded in his garage. Storms sometimes trapped travelers beyond the village. Once, when I was young, part of our roof collapsed during the night and he carried me outside wrapped in a blanket while laughing as though the whole thing were an adventure.
But when he looked through that broken window, there was no laughter in him.
There was something I had never seen before.
Recognition without understanding.
"They are Jedi," he said.
My mother seemed relieved.
For one heartbeat, she was relieved.
That is important.
You must understand that.
When the people of Kerath saw their ships, when they saw their robes and their lightsabers, they did not reach for weapons. They did not prepare an ambush. They did not believe an enemy had come.
We knew what the Jedi claimed to be.
Guardians.
Peacekeepers.
Defenders of life.
My mother thought they had come to help us.
Then we watched one of them cut down our neighbor in the road.
He was an old man. He repaired fishing nets near the lakeshore. He could barely walk without a cane.
The Jedi killed him anyway.
My father pulled away from the window.
"The garage," he said.
There were people gathering there. I could see them through the smoke, running toward the broad durasteel doors because my father's garage was one of the strongest buildings in Kerath. Its walls were reinforced against fuel fires and winter storms. People believed they would be safe inside.
My father knew how to open the service tunnels beneath it. He knew where the emergency generators were kept. If anyone could help them escape, it was him.
My mother caught his arm.
For a moment they looked at one another.
No speeches passed between them. No grand farewell. They had been married too long to need words for everything.
She touched his face.
He pressed his forehead against hers.
Then he turned to me.
I have spent most of my life trying to remember every detail of his expression in that moment. The lines around his eyes. The gray beginning to show in his beard. The small burn beneath his jaw from a welding accident he insisted had not been his fault.
I have tried to preserve him perfectly.
Time has taken pieces anyway.
I no longer remember the precise color of his eyes.
I remember his hands.
He placed them against the sides of my face, leaving grease across my skin.
"Stay with your mother."
That was the last thing my father ever said to me.
Then he ran into the snow.
My mother locked the door behind him.
We remained inside for only a few minutes.
Perhaps less.
Time became difficult to measure after the screaming began.
My mother moved through the house gathering blankets, food, and the old medical kit she kept beneath the sink. She spoke quickly, telling me that we would follow the southern path into the woods. We would circle around the village. We would find my father when it was safe.
She said it as though safety were still something that existed.
Through the broken window, I saw people falling in the street.
Some carried children.
Some wore nothing but sleeping clothes beneath hastily thrown coats.
The ships fired wherever people gathered.
My mother took my hand. We stepped through the front door. The snow had turned gray with ash. For one moment, we stood together on the front steps of the only home I had ever known.
My mother looked toward the garage. I think she was searching for my father.
A Jedi emerged through the smoke. His lightsaber was already lit.
Blue. Bright enough to stain the snow.
My mother pushed me behind her. She was a teacher. That was all.
She taught children their history. She taught them mathematics and literature. She taught them to ask questions. She taught them that knowledge carried a responsibility to be kind.
She had no weapon.
She raised her empty hands.
"There is a child here," she said.
The Jedi continued toward us.
"There is a child here."
She said it louder the second time, as though perhaps he had not heard her.
I remember the smell of smoke in her hair.
I remember how small her shoulders seemed between me and that blade.
My mother asked the question that has followed me for sixty years.
"Why?"
The Jedi did not answer her. He drove the lightsaber through her chest. She made a sound I had never heard from another living thing. The blade emerged from her back so close to my face that I felt its heat against my skin.
For an instant, the blue light shone through her. Then it vanished. My mother fell backward into me. We tumbled down the steps together.
There are moments that divide a life into what existed before them and what crawled away afterward. The weight of my mother was such a moment.
She was still alive when she landed on me. Only for a few seconds. Her mouth moved near my ear, but I could not hear her over the ships and the screaming. I have spent decades imagining what she might have said:
Run.
I love you.
Find your father.
Do not be afraid.
Perhaps she said nothing at all. Perhaps she was only trying to breathe.
I pushed myself out from beneath her. I wish I could tell you that I was brave. I wish I could tell you that I stood and fought, that I spat in the Jedi's face, that I told him he would answer for what he had done.
I did none of those things.
I begged.
I told him I was sorry.
I did not know what I had done, but I apologized for it. I promised I would never do it again. I promised to leave. I promised to be good.
I was sixteen years old, kneeling in the snow beside my mother's body, begging a Jedi not to kill me.
He raised his lightsaber. Someone shouted from farther down the road. The Jedi turned to look.
I ran.
That is how I survived the steps of his childhood home. Not through strength. Not through cunning.
I ran while my mother bled into the snow behind me.
I fled toward the garage because my father was there. Because he had always known how to fix things. Because some part of me still believed he could fix this.
The streets of Kerath had become a graveyard.
I passed people I had known all my life. The woman who had taught me to swim. The man who sharpened my father's tools. A boy who had sat beside me in my mother's classroom.
Some were already dead. Some were still dying.
A woman reached for my ankle and begged me to help lift a beam from her daughter. I pulled myself free.
A wounded man called my father's name, believing I was him. I kept moving.
A child cried beneath an overturned transport. I kept moving.
I wanted to find my father.
For sixty years, I have wondered how many people died while I ran past them.
The garage stood near the house, I'd taken a roundabout way to get to it because of where the Jedi was. Its wide doors were open and its work lights shone through the smoke. Dozens of people had gathered around it. Families crowded inside while my father and several others tried to move them toward the service tunnels.
He was standing in front of the entrance when I reached the road, a hydrospanner in one hand and a cutting torch in the other.
Tools.
That was what my father carried against the Jedi.
Behind him were children. Neighbors. The old and wounded. People he had repaired heaters for. People whose transports he had kept running through the winter. People who had sat at our table and laughed with him.
He stood between them and three Jedi.
I called to him. He heard me. Our eyes met across the road. The relief on his face nearly brought him to his knees.
Then he saw the blood on my clothes. He looked toward our house. Toward the place where my mother lay upon the steps.
He understood.
Something changed inside his face. Not into hatred. My father had no room in him for hatred, even then.
It was grief. Pure and complete. It passed through him so deeply that I watched the man I had known disappear beneath it.
But he did not abandon the people behind him. He did not run to me. He stayed where he was.
"Get inside!" he shouted.
I tried to reach him.
A Jedi moved forward.
My father ignited the cutting torch and swung it toward him. The flame could not stop a lightsaber. It could not pierce armor or turn aside the Force.
But it made the Jedi step back.
Only once. Only for a heartbeat. That heartbeat allowed another family to reach the service tunnel.
My father charged. Not because he believed he could win, but because there were still people behind him.
The first Jedi caught his cutting torch and tore it from his hand.
The second struck him across the chest.
The blade passed through my father's body as though he were made of smoke. It cut him in two.
I watched the man who had taught me to repair broken things fall in separate pieces before the doors of his garage.
His upper body struck the snow first. One of his hands remained outstretched toward me.
I screamed his name. I ran toward him.
Someone seized me from behind.
One of our neighbors dragged me through their garage doors as blaster fire struck the walls. I kicked and fought, begging them to let me go. I could see my father through the entrance.
I could see his hand.
Even after the rest of him had stopped moving, his fingers remained curled as though he were still reaching for me.
Then the doors closed.
I never saw him again.
We escaped through the service tunnels beneath the city.
My father had built them years earlier to carry heating conduits beneath the settlement. He had complained about them often. The passages were too narrow. The access panels were badly placed. Whoever had designed them had never held a wrench in his life.
Those tunnels saved me. My father saved me.
I crawled through darkness while people sobbed around me. Someone held a hand over a child's mouth so the Jedi would not hear her crying. Behind us, the ground shook as the garage was destroyed.
Dust fell from the ceiling. The lights failed. We kept moving.
When we emerged beyond the village, the forest was burning.
Ships circled above Kerath, firing into homes, roads, and the people attempting to flee across the frozen lake.
I hid beneath the roots of a fallen tree. From there, I watched my world die.
The school where my mother taught collapsed before nightfall.
My father's garage burned until morning.
Our house remained standing longer than most. Through the broken walls, I could see the light of blades moving from room to room.
I remember thinking that the table would be destroyed. Innocuous. Simple.
That thought broke something inside me.
Not my mother on the steps.
Not my father before the garage.
The table.
The place where she had made breakfast.
The place where he had complained about the weather.
The place where I had spent sixteen years believing I was safe.
Now it was gone.
I remained in the forest until the screaming stopped.
Then I fled.
I fled Kerath.
I fled Veykar Prime.
I fled the boy who wanted to become a mechanic.
People have called me many things since that morning.
Sith.
Monster.
Tyrant.
Murderer.
Some of those names were deserved.
For a long time, I believed hatred was the only inheritance my parents had left me. I took the agony of their deaths and sharpened it. I carried it into the galaxy like a blade. I told myself that vengeance would restore something that had been stolen.
It did not.
Nothing will return my mother to her classroom.
Nothing will put my father back together.
Nothing will allow me to sit at that table again and tell them that I loved them.
I do not write this so that you will hate every person who has ever worn the robes of the Jedi.
Hatred is too simple.
I write this because institutions will ask you to forget the bodies beneath their ideals. They will tell you that their cause is righteous, that their authority is necessary, that those they destroyed must have presented some hidden danger.
They will ask what my people did to deserve extinction.
They will not ask why an Order that claimed to defend life believed it possessed the right to decide whether an entire species should continue to exist.
My mother asked them why. They answered her with a lightsaber.
My father placed himself between them and the helpless. They cut him in two.
I have asked the same question for sixty years.
Perhaps I will die without an answer.
But I remember.
I remember my father's hands against my face.
I remember the flour on my mother's cheek.
I remember the weather outside the window.
I remember breakfast growing cold upon the table.
And somewhere beneath all that hatred, beneath everything I became in order to survive, there is still a sixteen-year-old boy hiding beneath the roots of a tree.
He is cold.
He is covered in his mother's blood.
He can still see his father's hand reaching across the snow.
He is listening to his world die.
And he is still waiting for someone to tell him why.
There are more dignified ways to phrase it.
I could say that they died during the pacification of Veykar Prime. I could call it an assault, an operation, a purge, or any of the other bloodless words historians use to make murder easier to place inside an archive.
I could say that Kerath was destroyed.
I could say that my people were exterminated.
All of those statements would be true.
None of them would tell you that my mother had been making breakfast.
She stood beside the kitchen counter with her sleeves rolled above her elbows, her hair tied back so it would not fall into her face. There was flour on one cheek. A small white streak she had not noticed, and which neither my father nor I had bothered to mention because we were waiting to see how long it would take her to discover it herself.
My father sat at the table, complaining about the weather.
It was a cold morning, even for Kerath. Frost had formed along the corners of the windows, and the mountains beyond Lake Serik were little more than dark shapes behind the falling snow. My father claimed he could feel another storm coming in his left knee. My mother told him his left knee predicted a storm whenever he wanted an excuse to remain inside.
He said a wise mechanic listened to his machinery.
She said a wise mechanic replaced defective parts.
I laughed.
That is the last sound I remember from before my childhood ended.
My father had promised I could come to the garage with him that day. There was a damaged heating assembly waiting for us, pulled from one of the houses near the northern path. He intended to show me how to rebuild the regulator rather than simply replace it.
He always believed things deserved the chance to be repaired.
Machines. Homes. Friendships. People.
"If it can still tell you where it hurts," he used to say, "then it is not beyond saving."
I believed him.
At sixteen, I believed my father knew everything worth knowing.
I wanted hands like his. Scarred, strong, permanently stained with grease no amount of scrubbing could completely remove. I wanted to understand machines by touch. I wanted to hear a failing engine and know which part was suffering. I wanted a garage of my own someday, perhaps beside his, where the people of Kerath would bring me the things they could not mend themselves.
That was the entirety of my ambition.
I did not dream of power.
I did not dream of vengeance.
I did not know enough of the galaxy to hate it.
Then the sky opened.
The first explosion was distant. The walls trembled, and a few dishes rattled inside the cupboard.
My mother stopped moving.
My father looked toward the window.
There was another impact, closer this time. Somewhere outside, an alarm began to sound.
I remember feeling excited.
That is one of the memories I hate most.
I had never heard the settlement alarm used for anything but drills. I thought perhaps a transport had crashed in the storm. I thought my father and I might be needed. I imagined following him into the snow with our tools, helping him repair something important while frightened people watched.
Then someone began screaming outside.
My father rose so quickly that his chair struck the floor.
The third explosion shattered a window.
My mother pulled me down before the glass reached us. It sprayed across the kitchen, scattering over the table, the floor, and the breakfast she had been preparing. The room filled with snow and smoke.
My father crawled toward the window.
I can still see his face when he looked outside.
My father was not easily frightened. Machines sometimes exploded in his garage. Storms sometimes trapped travelers beyond the village. Once, when I was young, part of our roof collapsed during the night and he carried me outside wrapped in a blanket while laughing as though the whole thing were an adventure.
But when he looked through that broken window, there was no laughter in him.
There was something I had never seen before.
Recognition without understanding.
"They are Jedi," he said.
My mother seemed relieved.
For one heartbeat, she was relieved.
That is important.
You must understand that.
When the people of Kerath saw their ships, when they saw their robes and their lightsabers, they did not reach for weapons. They did not prepare an ambush. They did not believe an enemy had come.
We knew what the Jedi claimed to be.
Guardians.
Peacekeepers.
Defenders of life.
My mother thought they had come to help us.
Then we watched one of them cut down our neighbor in the road.
He was an old man. He repaired fishing nets near the lakeshore. He could barely walk without a cane.
The Jedi killed him anyway.
My father pulled away from the window.
"The garage," he said.
There were people gathering there. I could see them through the smoke, running toward the broad durasteel doors because my father's garage was one of the strongest buildings in Kerath. Its walls were reinforced against fuel fires and winter storms. People believed they would be safe inside.
My father knew how to open the service tunnels beneath it. He knew where the emergency generators were kept. If anyone could help them escape, it was him.
My mother caught his arm.
For a moment they looked at one another.
No speeches passed between them. No grand farewell. They had been married too long to need words for everything.
She touched his face.
He pressed his forehead against hers.
Then he turned to me.
I have spent most of my life trying to remember every detail of his expression in that moment. The lines around his eyes. The gray beginning to show in his beard. The small burn beneath his jaw from a welding accident he insisted had not been his fault.
I have tried to preserve him perfectly.
Time has taken pieces anyway.
I no longer remember the precise color of his eyes.
I remember his hands.
He placed them against the sides of my face, leaving grease across my skin.
"Stay with your mother."
That was the last thing my father ever said to me.
Then he ran into the snow.
My mother locked the door behind him.
We remained inside for only a few minutes.
Perhaps less.
Time became difficult to measure after the screaming began.
My mother moved through the house gathering blankets, food, and the old medical kit she kept beneath the sink. She spoke quickly, telling me that we would follow the southern path into the woods. We would circle around the village. We would find my father when it was safe.
She said it as though safety were still something that existed.
Through the broken window, I saw people falling in the street.
Some carried children.
Some wore nothing but sleeping clothes beneath hastily thrown coats.
The ships fired wherever people gathered.
My mother took my hand. We stepped through the front door. The snow had turned gray with ash. For one moment, we stood together on the front steps of the only home I had ever known.
My mother looked toward the garage. I think she was searching for my father.
A Jedi emerged through the smoke. His lightsaber was already lit.
Blue. Bright enough to stain the snow.
My mother pushed me behind her. She was a teacher. That was all.
She taught children their history. She taught them mathematics and literature. She taught them to ask questions. She taught them that knowledge carried a responsibility to be kind.
She had no weapon.
She raised her empty hands.
"There is a child here," she said.
The Jedi continued toward us.
"There is a child here."
She said it louder the second time, as though perhaps he had not heard her.
I remember the smell of smoke in her hair.
I remember how small her shoulders seemed between me and that blade.
My mother asked the question that has followed me for sixty years.
"Why?"
The Jedi did not answer her. He drove the lightsaber through her chest. She made a sound I had never heard from another living thing. The blade emerged from her back so close to my face that I felt its heat against my skin.
For an instant, the blue light shone through her. Then it vanished. My mother fell backward into me. We tumbled down the steps together.
There are moments that divide a life into what existed before them and what crawled away afterward. The weight of my mother was such a moment.
She was still alive when she landed on me. Only for a few seconds. Her mouth moved near my ear, but I could not hear her over the ships and the screaming. I have spent decades imagining what she might have said:
Run.
I love you.
Find your father.
Do not be afraid.
Perhaps she said nothing at all. Perhaps she was only trying to breathe.
I pushed myself out from beneath her. I wish I could tell you that I was brave. I wish I could tell you that I stood and fought, that I spat in the Jedi's face, that I told him he would answer for what he had done.
I did none of those things.
I begged.
I told him I was sorry.
I did not know what I had done, but I apologized for it. I promised I would never do it again. I promised to leave. I promised to be good.
I was sixteen years old, kneeling in the snow beside my mother's body, begging a Jedi not to kill me.
He raised his lightsaber. Someone shouted from farther down the road. The Jedi turned to look.
I ran.
That is how I survived the steps of his childhood home. Not through strength. Not through cunning.
I ran while my mother bled into the snow behind me.
I fled toward the garage because my father was there. Because he had always known how to fix things. Because some part of me still believed he could fix this.
The streets of Kerath had become a graveyard.
I passed people I had known all my life. The woman who had taught me to swim. The man who sharpened my father's tools. A boy who had sat beside me in my mother's classroom.
Some were already dead. Some were still dying.
A woman reached for my ankle and begged me to help lift a beam from her daughter. I pulled myself free.
A wounded man called my father's name, believing I was him. I kept moving.
A child cried beneath an overturned transport. I kept moving.
I wanted to find my father.
For sixty years, I have wondered how many people died while I ran past them.
The garage stood near the house, I'd taken a roundabout way to get to it because of where the Jedi was. Its wide doors were open and its work lights shone through the smoke. Dozens of people had gathered around it. Families crowded inside while my father and several others tried to move them toward the service tunnels.
He was standing in front of the entrance when I reached the road, a hydrospanner in one hand and a cutting torch in the other.
Tools.
That was what my father carried against the Jedi.
Behind him were children. Neighbors. The old and wounded. People he had repaired heaters for. People whose transports he had kept running through the winter. People who had sat at our table and laughed with him.
He stood between them and three Jedi.
I called to him. He heard me. Our eyes met across the road. The relief on his face nearly brought him to his knees.
Then he saw the blood on my clothes. He looked toward our house. Toward the place where my mother lay upon the steps.
He understood.
Something changed inside his face. Not into hatred. My father had no room in him for hatred, even then.
It was grief. Pure and complete. It passed through him so deeply that I watched the man I had known disappear beneath it.
But he did not abandon the people behind him. He did not run to me. He stayed where he was.
"Get inside!" he shouted.
I tried to reach him.
A Jedi moved forward.
My father ignited the cutting torch and swung it toward him. The flame could not stop a lightsaber. It could not pierce armor or turn aside the Force.
But it made the Jedi step back.
Only once. Only for a heartbeat. That heartbeat allowed another family to reach the service tunnel.
My father charged. Not because he believed he could win, but because there were still people behind him.
The first Jedi caught his cutting torch and tore it from his hand.
The second struck him across the chest.
The blade passed through my father's body as though he were made of smoke. It cut him in two.
I watched the man who had taught me to repair broken things fall in separate pieces before the doors of his garage.
His upper body struck the snow first. One of his hands remained outstretched toward me.
I screamed his name. I ran toward him.
Someone seized me from behind.
One of our neighbors dragged me through their garage doors as blaster fire struck the walls. I kicked and fought, begging them to let me go. I could see my father through the entrance.
I could see his hand.
Even after the rest of him had stopped moving, his fingers remained curled as though he were still reaching for me.
Then the doors closed.
I never saw him again.
We escaped through the service tunnels beneath the city.
My father had built them years earlier to carry heating conduits beneath the settlement. He had complained about them often. The passages were too narrow. The access panels were badly placed. Whoever had designed them had never held a wrench in his life.
Those tunnels saved me. My father saved me.
I crawled through darkness while people sobbed around me. Someone held a hand over a child's mouth so the Jedi would not hear her crying. Behind us, the ground shook as the garage was destroyed.
Dust fell from the ceiling. The lights failed. We kept moving.
When we emerged beyond the village, the forest was burning.
Ships circled above Kerath, firing into homes, roads, and the people attempting to flee across the frozen lake.
I hid beneath the roots of a fallen tree. From there, I watched my world die.
The school where my mother taught collapsed before nightfall.
My father's garage burned until morning.
Our house remained standing longer than most. Through the broken walls, I could see the light of blades moving from room to room.
I remember thinking that the table would be destroyed. Innocuous. Simple.
That thought broke something inside me.
Not my mother on the steps.
Not my father before the garage.
The table.
The place where she had made breakfast.
The place where he had complained about the weather.
The place where I had spent sixteen years believing I was safe.
Now it was gone.
I remained in the forest until the screaming stopped.
Then I fled.
I fled Kerath.
I fled Veykar Prime.
I fled the boy who wanted to become a mechanic.
People have called me many things since that morning.
Sith.
Monster.
Tyrant.
Murderer.
Some of those names were deserved.
For a long time, I believed hatred was the only inheritance my parents had left me. I took the agony of their deaths and sharpened it. I carried it into the galaxy like a blade. I told myself that vengeance would restore something that had been stolen.
It did not.
Nothing will return my mother to her classroom.
Nothing will put my father back together.
Nothing will allow me to sit at that table again and tell them that I loved them.
I do not write this so that you will hate every person who has ever worn the robes of the Jedi.
Hatred is too simple.
I write this because institutions will ask you to forget the bodies beneath their ideals. They will tell you that their cause is righteous, that their authority is necessary, that those they destroyed must have presented some hidden danger.
They will ask what my people did to deserve extinction.
They will not ask why an Order that claimed to defend life believed it possessed the right to decide whether an entire species should continue to exist.
My mother asked them why. They answered her with a lightsaber.
My father placed himself between them and the helpless. They cut him in two.
I have asked the same question for sixty years.
Perhaps I will die without an answer.
But I remember.
I remember my father's hands against my face.
I remember the flour on my mother's cheek.
I remember the weather outside the window.
I remember breakfast growing cold upon the table.
And somewhere beneath all that hatred, beneath everything I became in order to survive, there is still a sixteen-year-old boy hiding beneath the roots of a tree.
He is cold.
He is covered in his mother's blood.
He can still see his father's hand reaching across the snow.
He is listening to his world die.
And he is still waiting for someone to tell him why.
