Vindictive | Prologue

Tragedy apparently always has its ways to find me. It is like a shadow, always connected to its owner. No matter how hard I try to prevent it from happening, I can’t because somehow the word had etched itself on the palm of my hands. Everything I do always end up with something bad. Often I think: tragedy is a disease that I am born to have; a disease that no one can ever find a cure for. Although there is some point in my life where I thought I had finally broke free from its cage that we call a bad omen, I should have known that tragedy comes into someone’s life in different forms. Mine just happens to be death, another death and…love.

Having to live such life, it comes with utter unfortunate consequences. Ditto with tragedy, it comes in different kinds. Lack of much needed luck made me suffer the aftermaths of nightmares and hallucinations.

Ever since the night of my parents’ passing, the same nightmares just keep on coming to me like a never-ending flash flood. It will haunt me in my sleep; the rest I need the most after hours of long and exhausting training. I won’t even lie with saying that it had taken away a sliver sane part of me, and the peace that I use to find easily at night. I can’t bring myself to close my eyes after dusk had blanketed the sky because every time I do so, the same faces peers at me. Their eyes are always bloodshot and would bore into mine, whilst I helplessly hug my knees in a dark corner trying to prevent the tears from spilling, as my father had told me that crying is a sign of weakness. But the only thing that tears down all the walls I’ve been trying to put up is the gruesome image in front of my innocent eyes. My parents are covered in an unbelievable amount of blood. It is like, they don’t want to wake up in the morning and someone had to shower them with a bucket of water – or in my parents’ case, blood.

The hallucinations did not help either. The nightmares I can manage, but the hallucinations just made everything worse. It made me see things – or people – I do not want to see in my life ever again. It is always the killers I hallucinate, with their tall, buff figures standing at the end of the dark alley. Somehow, my eyes will always gravitate towards the weapon they have in their violent hands: a gun. But it is not just an ordinary gun as it is the one small object that ended both of my parents’ lives.

It isn’t long until my hallucinations and nightmares got the best of me. I become paranoid. I can’t get out of the house without having the feeling of being followed and with every move, I feel like I am held under investigation. It feels as if someone is trying to study me so when they come to attack, they know everything they have to do to destroy me.

Of course, I won’t let that happen, so I start to sleep with a weapon next to me. It may sound so dangerous but that is the only thing that keeps me sane, like I know for a reason I’m protected by an invisible force.

Oblivious to the consequences it brings, it may have been the dumbest idea I had ever conjured, as I unintentionally took someone’s life with my own hands.

By the time I was seventeen and alone, I had concluded that death was just a matter of moving furniture. But the worst of it all, I became a murderer.