Night Wandering

Author: mjisinyourwalls

night wandering

1.

If I was smart, if I wanted to make things easy, I would have just killed myself. I know, I know, that’s dark. A story like this has to start with something dark like that, something that establishes just how bad I was feeling. If I wasn’t feeling that bad, I wouldn’t have gotten myself into any of this. But, contrary to what I wish, I was feeling that bad. I felt hopeless. I felt as though there was a void in my body, settled right between my lungs, deep in the warm tissues of my organs. The void was throbbing and pulsating, thrumming steadily at all times like it had its own desires and goals. It was lodged so deep in my body that there was no way for me to get it out myself, and I simply couldn’t live like that.
I have always felt this way, really, ever since I was a little kid. I trudged through depression cycles for years from about age nine to sixteen, and after sixteen it just never went away. I’m twenty now, not even a quarter of the way through my projected lifespan, and I hate myself, and everyone I know. I hate my job, I hate my apartment, I hate my bed, I hate leaving my bed. I hate everything, but I am really making no efforts to get out of the “situation” I am in. It’s so much easier to sit and submerge yourself in these negative feelings than it is to just deal with them.
Lately, in all my time sitting at home, I have lost the spark of the only thing that used to bring me joy. I used to at least be able to sink into a good show, or a good book, or my personal favorite, a good film. But now I can’t. Whenever I start something, I get this angry scratching feeling from the base of my brain that yells at me that it’s not right, that it’s not the feeling that I was looking for. There is some perfect piece of media out there, according to my mind, the one that will solve all my problems and change the trajectory of my shipwreck of a life, but I am just too stupid to find it. This awful nagging feeling turned me off of any kind of media consumption and made me just feel absolutely crazy every time I opened a book or turned my television on, so I just gave up on pursuing this formerly euphoric stimulation.
Now earlier, I called my life a shipwreck. That is accurate, but it’s necessary to preface the kind of shipwreck we are discussing. Definitely not the crash on the rocks, or beach on an island kinda shipwreck. It’s the sort where the boat is in the middle of a dark and stormy sea, floating aimlessly with no life in sight. Just the broad expanse of dark water on every side you could look at. The ship didn’t truly wreck on anything, it just simply failed to function in the way that it was intended too. The ship was designed to float, yet it has begun to take on the dark, cold, murky water into its hollow and inexplicably ruptured hull. The water leaks in slowly but surely, an inky black hue in the darker regions of the ship that multiplies and multiplies until the ship slowly starts to go under. All the while, the lifeboats gave up and disappeared. They’re just gone. The ship is defying its one purpose in every way it possibly can.
Well, with that established, this ship is my life. And what other purpose does an individual life have then to just live it? I think society would have you believe your purpose is to work, to fall in love, to have kids, to be a “productive member of society” as the proverbial saying goes. I respect that some people are able to achieve what they believe to be true happiness from these avenues, but I guess I am just difficult. I can’t see these traditional methods of living as an answer to my problems, probably due to the fact that I feel no inherent desire to do anything with my life. This hypothesis is what led me to the final ideal that I now cling to as an alternative lifestyle, one that I have decided to abide by despite my better judgement telling me it’s an awful thing to say…

If your purpose in the life you have is not to live, then it can be to die.

Okay, I know, not that trailblazing but still. It works for me. I decided the day after my twentieth birthday, one of the worst nights of my life, that I was very simply born to have a great death.
I spent the day I turned twenty pretty much alone, albeit saved by a drop in from my Mother, where I was promptly lectured on how much of a loser I am. Of course she said all her lovely “notes” in a much nicer tone. My Mother’s nicer tone pretty much just translates to a much more calculated and less traceable form of mockery. The kind where the words are so carefully picked out that they can’t necessarily be used against her or cited as mean, but they still convey the negative meaning and emotions so intensely that it never fails to make me angry with her. But, of course, when I get angry at her after she was only expressing how near and dear I am to her heart, her beloved daughter, I’m the big bitch who doesn’t want to be loved.
Well, my mother is a bridge we can cross later. I can’t exactly articulate her brand of evil right now, but the words will find me eventually when the time is right. We were discussing my new outlook on life. Or on death, I suppose you could say.
I began to develop a perverse fascination with what some called the “art” of dying. This art is the way that some strange people, usually some kind of serial murderers, would describe how they killed people. There was some kind of system to it, something that made the body and the ending of a life artful in a way that only people with these unique proclivities could see. There was something so intensely erotic and fulfilling to me in the intimacy that could come from an exchange in death, the taking of a life by another, the deep closeness that could arise from one individual ending another.
This is where things get complicated.
For most people, these perverse fantasies would be some kind of spark that leads them to commit violence against other people, or animals, or just some kind of destructive path that fed into these sickly idealized forms of consumption that involved the wreckage of one life for the benefit of another.
What I began to obsess over was being the one who would die. I can’t say that I at all feel comfortable with the concept of someone murdering another innocent unwilling human being. It fills me with dread and empathy that I don’t believe I can fully convey through my words, but trust me when I say I am not that completely reprehensible as a person. I don’t advocate for the pain and death of any innocent person. I am not cold or unfeeling towards others, I just dislike being around them. I am not a cruel person… I am just detached. I feel distended from my own body and self. My mind and body do not live in harmony with one another, so I think the only real option is to separate the two. And why not make it as much of a spectacle as possible? I think there’s nothing shameful in going out with a bang, ending it all with a bit of a creative flair! But, of course, the only person who I am one hundred percent on board with dying in such a way is myself. I suppose that’s sick too, but who can really help what they feel?
I began to heavily mull over these thoughts and feelings, and that was when I started taking my night walks. I would leave the apartment building in the middle of the night, usually between one to three a.m. In case I neglected to mention earlier, my recent long patch of depression eliminated sleep for me almost altogether. I can still get some good rest if I try, but dark circles are chic now anyways. They frame my eyes well.
These night walks strangely acted as a first overall wish for death on my part. I had never really been suicidal, not even worked through the idea of causing my own death. Something about that just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like the path that I was on. So I just didn’t think about that. No, what I mean by wishing for death is just the hope that the natural risk of being a lone woman, young, attractive, out late at night with nothing to defend herself would pay off. I really thought it would be easy! Just go out for the night walks and lose yourself in thought, eyes glazing over from the sheer lack of visible awareness, retreating like a turtle into the shell of a fertile and overworking (but of course tired) mind.
The walks continued, the months stretched on, and as one might be able to gather by now, I was still very much alive. Not alive and well, I’ll have you know, as anyone walking around at night hoping to be brutally murdered can’t be considered well. But I was alive. The heart in my chest still pattered. The blood in my veins pumped excruciatingly warm on cold winter nights. My lungs still inflated and deflated with cold night air, and the black void that lived between these two air sacs burrowed deeper into the viscera of my guts until it felt as though I would never be able to get it out.
A few months after my birthday, I got laid off from my stupid little job. It didn’t bother me all that much, but it did relight the spark of motivation to get this artful death that I was seeking to happen. I decided one night to bring a hundred dollars out with me. I walked out to the park near my apartment building, one that I frequently trudged through on my night wanderings, and I approached one of the many homeless people who lived in the park with an offer no one could refuse:
“Hello. If I gave you this hundred dollars, would you kill me?”
The man stared at me incredulously. He was a bit taller than me, and very skinny. Definitely some kind of drug problem, so I figured he could use the money. Of course, with my luck, the man clearly wasn’t high enough to even consider such a strange offer. But he was sober enough to play a little game with me!
“Sure kid. Why not.”
I grinned and placed the hundred dollars in his palm, which he quickly pocketed.
“Okay, how do you want to kill me?” I said with a smile.
“Im not gonna kill you.” he muttered. “Crazy bitch.”
“Well, why’d you take the hundred dollars if you’re not gonna kill me?”
“Cuz I wanted a hundred bucks? Get away from me.”
I was furious! This man preyed on my depressed state and tricked me. Soooooooooo,
I picked up a small rock and threw it right at his ass. Then I ran back home, down a hundred bucks and still very much alive! That guy was a dick.
Attempting one at getting murdered had failed miserably. I started to realize that I had to isolate where exactly the demographic of murdering sickos would be, and start to display myself there like a prey animal waiting to be hunted.
I sat on the small balcony of my apartment, smoking a cigarette and pondering the nature of life and death. Then, after pondering a bit too hard and starting to give myself a headache, an idea hit me like a lightning bolt. Something so simple, so idiotically obvious that I laughed at myself over not having thought of it before!
Where was the number one gathering place for degenerates, perverts, and psychotics to gather?! The internet! The internet was the answer! All I had to do was find the exact place that had what I was looking for, make some kind of post, and boom, I could find the perfect person to kill me!
With this, I realized the possibilities of what I was pursuing. There were specific things that I wanted out of this exchange, and I think it’s only fair that I got what I want when I’m the one giving my life away for free.
Almost an entire pack of cigarettes later, I was able to discern what it is that I wanted. I knew that I wanted a man to kill me. I wanted to find the man attractive, and I wanted to have a consensual sex encounter with him before he killed me. I wanted the death to be violent and bloody, a complete ravaging of my external self, and a living autopsy of my internal organs. By the end of it all, I wanted to barely look human. Only my face would stay intact. As for the rest, the moniker was pretty simple.
Outside shredded, and insides on the outside.
I knew that I would want to have a meeting, almost like a date, with this mystery man, whoever he ended up being. I wanted to talk to him, to feel out that this was the correct thing for me to do and that he was the right person. That was very important. I expect to spend time with this person before I allow them to take my life.
I dug around on the surface level of the dark web, looking for any kind of site that could assist me in my insane quest. Strangely enough, I ended up finding a site aptly labeled “Kill Me”, which was functioning almost the exact same purpose that I had been looking for!
All I had to do was take a few pictures of myself, and then a small form under it would tell the viewers of this site what it is specifically that I sought. I puffed a bit of smoke out in a chuckle as I read through some of the other posts on the site. It seemed for all of the women and men posting on here, this was more of a kink thing than an actual site for planning your own death.
One very crusty looking older woman basically treated it as a dating site profile, discussing what she was into and what she was looking for. I wondered if she ever found it, if maybe she was on a missing person’s registry by now for playing around on the dark web. Not a great idea unless you really did want to get murdered like I did! I wondered if a lot of the men who surfed sites like this were just into hardcore bondage and BDSM, or if they really were looking for someone to murder. Hard to say, but I figured it was worth a shot. I posted. I linked my personal phone number on the post, and said for anyone who messaged to state who they were.
Later that night, I got my first message.
When I read his message, it was like something inside me clicked. The black hole between my lungs clenched and folded in on itself, making it take up less space in my body. Somehow, I knew that he was “the one”, in the most fucked up way any normal person could possibly imagine. I took the post down after this first message, because I knew deep in my bones that whatever I was looking for was going to come from this man.

MICAH
hi, my name is micah.
i saw ur post online,
i think ur beautiful
ive never done anything
like this but i
have always wanted to.
maybe we can help each
other? i’ll take u to dinner
and we can talk abt it?

Under that sickly sweet message, he sent a photo of himself with the caption this is me under it. He was gorgeous. Well built, nice face. Sharp nose, strong jaw, full lips. He had a sort of eastern european look to him, a bit tired and overworked but strong and healthy. His eyes were a piercing green, a similar shade to my own, but lighter. He seemed to look right into me through the picture, to pierce into my very being. He was Micah, and I was sure that he would kill me just how I wanted it. Would be a pleasure to fuck him first anyways.
I heard the winds pick up outside and closed the window. Rain began to patter against the glass, and lightning lit up the sky at that very moment. It was so cinematic! I could feel it churning in my gut, the stimulation and adventure that I was looking for when I started this strange, morbid journey. Warmth pooled in my belly as I thought of him. Micah. I wanted to know his story, everything about him, before I died. I wanted to truly know him, to create such an intense intimacy that the intersection of our lives would feel almost interplanetary, like a collision of two stars. Or maybe, an absorption of one cell by a bigger cluster of cells, the repurposing of matter and life for the benefit of another.
Thunder was loud outside, and the rain was now coming hard. I remembered then that storm season was coming to the city, and I felt a strange sense of ease for the first time in years. A storm truly was coming, the most beautiful and monumental one that anyone had ever seen.

There would be so much blood.

(tell me if anyone liked this. ill post more if anyone did. this is just chapter one in a way i guess.)