The Light Through the Tear

     You can hide from authority. People do it all the time. Papers disappear, names change, stories get rewritten until even the past starts to feel negotiable. You learn the angles, the timing, the careful distance between who you were and who you pretend to be now. You become practiced—convincing, even.

But hiding from yourself is a different craft entirely.

That’s where the cracks begin.

It starts small. A hesitation. A glance held too long in the mirror. A question your partner asks—innocent, undeserving—and you answer too quickly, too sharply. She doesn’t know you. Not really. And the worst part is, she trusts the version you’ve given her. She lives beside a carefully edited man, and she doesn’t deserve the omissions.

The tear in your fabric widens.

And then—of all people—he appears.

A name from years ago. A schoolyard echo. Someone who knew you before the edits, before the performance. He reaches out, casual, friendly… but you know better. He’s a retired cop now. That changes everything. Or maybe it confirms everything you already fear.

What does he want?

Reunion. Drinks. Laughter. Old stories dragged back into the light. You can already see it: the dim room, glasses clinking, nostalgia thick in the air. You’ll loosen up. You always do when the past starts calling your name. Melancholy will creep in, soften your guard.

And he’ll be there.

Listening.

Not just hearing—listening. Watching the pauses, the slips, the things you don’t say. You imagine a recorder in his pocket, or maybe it’s worse—maybe he doesn’t need one. Maybe your words will be enough.

You start rehearsing conversations that haven’t happened yet. Defences against questions that haven’t been asked.

This is where the nightmares begin.

They don’t announce themselves. They bleed into sleep, into the fragile space where control slips. Images come slowly at first, then linger. They don’t rush. They linger. Like they want you to see every detail, every consequence, every truth you’ve buried.

You wake drenched, breath sharp, heart hammering against your ribs like it’s trying to escape you.

And it doesn’t stop there.

The fear follows you into the day, wraps around you like something alive. Anxiety hums beneath everything—every conversation, every silence. Paranoia becomes your constant companion. Faces in crowds linger too long. Voices sound like they’re talking about you, even when they aren’t.

You wear it all like a coat—a coat of a thousand colours, stitched together from dread, memory, and the quiet certainty that something is coming.

You lie still sometimes, completely still, as if movement might trigger something irreversible. Frozen. Waiting. Watching the images pass behind your eyes like a slow-motion film you never agreed to watch.

And then—

Morning.

Light spills in. Real light. Honest light. It touches familiar things: the room, the street, the ordinary world that continues without accusation. For a moment, you breathe. For a moment, you believe in the possibility of distance from it all.

Daylight is merciful.

But it is temporary.

Because you already know what waits.

Darkness doesn’t forget. It doesn’t forgive. It follows. Patient. Relentless. It doesn’t need to chase you—it knows you’ll come back to it, every single night.

And beneath it all, there’s a truth you can’t outrun:

This isn’t something being done to you.

This is something you built.

Carefully. Quietly. Piece by piece.

A private hell.

And now you live in it.

How bloody smart of you.

The Making of a Murderer

     Dr Jimmy wasn’t leaving the house the same way he’d entered it.

The broken window pane—jagged, whispering with the risk of noise, blood, and exposure—was no longer an option. Entry had required urgency. Exit demanded control. And control, above all else, was what defined him.

Luck, or perhaps something darker that followed him like a shadow, had intervened. A key left casually in the back door. Carelessness. Trust. The small, human oversights that made everything possible.

He moved without hesitation.

Down the pebbled driveway he went, each step measured despite the uneven crunch beneath his shoes. The night wrapped around him—thick, damp, and indifferent. A darkened alleyway stretched alongside the property, a narrow artery leading him away from what he had done, away from what he had become. He slipped into it like something returning to its natural habitat.

Waiting at the end: his car. Silent. Obedient.

The hammer—still wet, still speaking its unspeakable truth—was tucked beneath his coat. Hidden. Controlled. Just another object again.

It was only once he was seated, door closed, engine humming low, that he saw himself.

The rear-view mirror caught him in the fractured glow of a streetlight.

And there he was.

Not the clean-cut medical student. Not the polite, well-liked young man of exemplary character. Not the one who smiled easily, who listened, who blended seamlessly into lecture halls and quiet conversations.

No—this face was something else entirely.

Red.

Completely red.

Blood masked every feature, soaked into the lines of his skin, clung to his hands as though it belonged there. For a moment—just a flicker—he stared. Not in horror. Not in disbelief.

But in recognition.

A problem had existed.

And now, it didn’t.

His breathing slowed. His mind, sharp as ever, began its quiet calculations. There would be noise soon. Panic. Sirens. Questions. The town would reel under the weight of what had been done.

But who would suspect him?

He almost smiled.

He was the last person anyone would imagine. That was the beauty of it. Reputation wasn’t just a shield—it was a weapon. Carefully built. Patiently maintained. And now, it served its purpose.

No clues.

No mistakes.

Nothing left behind but confusion and fear.

He pulled away from the curb, the car gliding into the sleeping streets as though nothing had happened at all.

Yet what fascinated him most wasn’t the act itself.

It was what came next.

The investigation.

The theatre of it.

The interviews. The suspects. The shifting suspicions. He could already see it unfolding—detectives circling the truth without ever quite touching it. Ordinary people placed under extraordinary pressure, their lives dissected, their words analysed, their faces watched for cracks.

And he would be there.

Not hidden in the shadows—but standing near the centre of it all.

Listening. Watching.

Learning.

It had happened so close to home, after all. Close enough to observe without ever being seen. Close enough to feel the pulse of the investigation as it tightened and twisted.

Close enough to enjoy it.

Because this wasn’t just an ending.

It was a beginning.

Not driven by madness, not by impulse—but by something colder. Something patient. Something that understood the value of restraint as much as release.

This was the moment a line had been crossed—quietly, cleanly, without hesitation.

This was the making of a murderer.

The Anatomy of Division

     “Define a pathological liar for me, Mr Big Cop.”   Why the constant lies? Do they know they're lying? Explain me, explain me like I'm five years old. How does a white lie, become someone who tells frequent lies... How do they become a pathological  liar?

That’s how it begins Tiny Fair  —not with a question, but with a seed. The initial lie. A seed planted quietly, deliberately, in soil already softened by trust. A pathological liar doesn’t just lie. That’s too simple, too blunt an instrument. No—he curates reality. He edits it, trims it, feeds it back to you in fragments until you begin to doubt your own memory, your own instincts, your own people.

I remember when he told me everyone I knew was a liar.

Not casually. Not as an aside. He explained it—carefully, almost clinically. He described how they lied, the little tells, the imagined betrayals, the hidden motives. But he never answered the most important question: why.

At the time, I didn’t understand. I thought it was insight. Experience. Authority speaking.

Now I see it for what it was: architecture.

Divide them.

Isolate them.

Make sure no two voices align long enough to compare truth.

Because comparison is fatal to a man like that.

If we had spoken—really spoken—notes would have been compared. Stories would have overlapped. Cracks would have formed. And behind those cracks, the rot.

So he lied to each of us individually. Tailored lies. Personal lies. Lies that ensured silence between us.

And in that silence, he became the only voice.

The only authority.

The only truth.

But what does it cost to live like that?

What does it feel like to exist in a world of your own fabrication?

To wake up every day and scan the horizon—not for opportunity, not for connection—but for threat.

Flashing blue lights.

A knock at the door.

A hand on your shoulder while you’re collecting your takeaway, heart stopping mid-beat, breath catching in your throat.

Always en garde.

Always listening.

Always calculating.

There’s no rest in that life. No stillness. No quiet moment where the mind unclenches. Just a constant hum of vigilance, like a wire pulled too tight, ready to snap.

You don’t live—you hover.

Between exposure and escape.

Between control and collapse.

And then the question lingers, heavy and unsettling:

When it finally ends—when the mask slips, when the truth surfaces, when the world sees what he is—what does he feel?

Fear?

Shame?

Or something far stranger…

Relief?

Because imagine it—the running stops. The watching stops. The endless calculations fall silent. No more lies to maintain, no more threads to keep from tangling.

Just… exposure.

Your face on every front page.

Serial killer arrested.

A label, final and immovable. A truth no longer negotiable.

Would that feel like annihilation?

Or freedom?

But men like that rarely leave it to chance.

No. He won’t let it get that far.

Because control is everything. Even at the end.

Especially at the end.

There will be a plan—there’s always a plan. An exit mapped out long before the walls begin to close in. And it won’t be surrender.

It will be disappearance.

Permanent, deliberate, final.

An escape that ensures no interrogation, no courtroom, no unraveling under fluorescent lights.

No one gets the full story.

No one gets closure.

And so the last question drifts, almost poetic in its darkness:

If there is a reckoning—if there is a descent—where does he land?

Which circle claims him?

The deceivers?

The betrayers?

Or somewhere deeper still, where truth is stripped bare and there’s no one left to lie to… not even yourself.

Because in the end, that’s the only audience that ever really mattered.

Not a Man Anymore

      The streets at 4 a.m. have a way of stripping things back to their barest truth. No crowds, no noise—just the quiet hum of streetlights and the soft hiss of rain settling into the pavement. It’s the hour where everything feels suspended, as if the world itself is holding its breath.

He walked through it like a ghost.

The rain had soaked through his clothes, but he barely noticed. Each step felt automatic, mechanical, like something wound up and set loose. The orange glow of the streetlights stretched his shadow long and thin ahead of him, a distorted version of himself leading the way home. Or perhaps away from it. Even he didn’t quite know anymore.

What did he feel?

Not what you’d expect.

There was no triumph. No satisfaction. Those ideas belonged to stories, to headlines, to the way people try to make sense of something senseless. The reality was quieter. Emptier. A kind of dull, echoing absence where something human should have been.

Because the moment itself—the act he could never name out loud—was never really the point.

It was the build-up.

The prowling.

The watching.

The slow tightening inside his chest, like a storm gathering pressure.

And then… release.

But release never lasted, although he would relish the news headlines, smiling,  congratulating himself on not getting caught.

By the time he found himself back on those rain-slick streets, it was already fading. What replaced it wasn’t guilt, not in the way most people understand it. It was something colder. A creeping awareness that nothing had changed. That whatever he thought he was feeding, silencing, or satisfying was still there—unchanged, unmoved, waiting.

He passed a row of darkened houses, each one sealed shut against the night. Behind those walls: warmth, sleep, ordinary lives untouched by him. The thought irritated him more than it should have. Not envy. Not quite. Something closer to resentment, like a wound that never healed properly.

Old habits drifted through his mind. Excuses. Methods. Ways in. A knock on the door. A voice softened just enough. A lie polished to sound like truth. He turned them over lazily, not because he needed them now, but because they were part of him—reflexes, almost.

But even those thoughts felt… thinner tonight.

He stopped under a flickering streetlamp, watching the rain fall through the light in slow, golden streaks. For a moment, there was something close to clarity.

He wasn’t becoming anything.

He already was.

Not because of one night, or many. Not because of drink, or anger, or the past he clung to like a justification. Those were excuses he wore like a coat—something to pull tight when the cold crept in.

The truth was simpler. Harder.

He had crossed something a long time ago, and there was no crossing back.

A figure moved in the distance—another early riser, or a late wanderer. He watched them for a moment, head slightly tilted, curiosity flickering… then fading just as quickly. Not tonight.

Tonight, there was only the walk.

Only the quiet.

Only the long walk home that never really felt like one.

And as he moved on, swallowed again by the dim glow of the streetlights and the endless rain, one thing followed him more persistently than any fear of being caught:

Not remorse.

Not relief.

Just the hollow certainty that whatever drove him would be waiting again— patient, unchanged (...)

The next time the streets fell silent. The next time, he was going to pay the old couple in the house on the corner of the road a visit. Their happy, warm loving home was soon to become a blood bath.

The Theatre of Ramona

 

     I’ve been inside your mind at least four times.

Long enough to know the layout. Long enough to recognize the creak in the floorboards before you hear it yourself.

Who is that by the door?

That’s Ramona.

It’s her party—though no one remembers when it started. The music loops without rhythm, laughter echoes from rooms that are now empty, and the air smells faintly of something sweet that’s turned. She puts on a very strange show, Ramona. Always has.

Her makeup is perfect at first—painted confidence, sharp edges, a face that dares you to look closer. But time is cruel in this theatre. It fades. It always fades. And when it does, she slips away to the mirror, pressing trembling fingers to her cheeks as if she can hold herself together by force.

She notices it before anyone else does.

Her friends are long gone.

That’s when she turns to you.

She won’t say it directly—not at first. She’ll laugh, pour another glass, adjust the lighting, restart the music. But her eyes will follow you. Always. Measuring the distance between you and the door like it’s a wound opening.

She will want to keep you from leaving.

And when she can’t pretend anymore, she will cry. Not loudly—no, Ramona doesn’t break like that. Her voice cracks in quiet places. She will ask what went wrong, over and over, as if the answer might change if she phrases it differently.

I know her.

I was her perfect he-whore—her reflection, her distraction, her proof that someone would stay, even if it was only for a while. Long enough to make the illusion believable.

And then there’s Loretta.

Sweet Loretta.

She exists in a different wing of the same theatre. Softer lighting. Cleaner air. She kept herself untouched by the chaos, or at least she tells herself she did. No drugs, no reckless nights—just the sparkle of Moët and the careful preservation of innocence like it’s something you can bottle and save for later.

She watches the show, but she doesn’t join it.

Not really.

But there is something else in this theatre.

Something that doesn’t belong to either of them.

In the dark wings, beyond the reach of stage light, there is a figure who never applauds, never speaks—only watches.

Doctor Jimmy.

Not a man in the way the others are. More like a presence. A phantom stitched into the velvet curtains and the shadows behind them. He waits there, patient, as if time has no meaning to him at all.

His eyes don’t wander.

They lock.

Always on the same thing—the quiet glow of people who still believe they are safe. The innocent aura of happiness shared between two bodies standing too close together, laughing too easily, unaware of the cracks beneath their feet.

A false sense of security.

That’s what draws him.

Not noise. Not chaos.

Calm.

He studies it like a weakness.

Slowly, almost ceremonially, he opens a bottle of gin. The sound is small—barely a click—but it echoes in the dark like a signal. His hands are steady, practiced. But tonight, something is different.

He feels it again.

That strange pull beneath the skin. That crawling awareness that something inside him is waking up.

He looks down.

And for a moment—just a flicker—there it is.

Blood.

Not fresh. Not flowing. Just the suggestion of it, blooming across his hands like memory refusing to fade. He turns them slightly in the dim light, as if expecting it to drip, to speak, to accuse.

A private haunting.

A whisper of Lady Macbeth—that same futile attempt to cleanse what cannot be undone.

But Doctor Jimmy doesn’t scrub.

He doesn’t panic.

He simply watches… and waits.

Because in this theatre, everyone is performing something.

Ramona performs desperation.

Loretta performs purity.

You perform detachment.

And Doctor Jimmy?

He performs nothing at all.

That’s what makes him dangerous.

Don’t ever lose control in this place. That’s the rule no one tells you until it’s too late. The acts are forbidden for a reason. The show is black—dark in a way that seeps into you, stains you, makes it hard to tell where you end and it begins.

Ramona will hold you when you try to leave. Desperate. Fingers digging into your sleeves, your wrists, your resolve. She’ll beg without words, her whole body leaning into yours like gravity has shifted.

And then—

when you finally reach the door,

when your hand is on the handle,

when the outside air almost touches your face—

she’ll say it.

“Thank God. I thought you were never going to go.”

That’s Ramona.

Needing you and resenting you for staying.

And Loretta?

With her, you were always one step ahead. You never belonged to her world, not fully. You played the part—lightly, carelessly. For fun. You counted your lovers like numbers on a scoreboard, each one meaning less than the last.

Hundreds.

Then fewer.

Then none.

Because that’s how it ends in this theatre.

Not with a grand finale, not with applause—just an empty room, the echo of who you thought you were, and the slow realization that somewhere along the way, something in the dark had been watching you too.

Learning you.

Waiting.

I’ve been inside your mind at least four times.

And every time, the show is the same.

Only now…

you’re not sure who’s in the audience anymore.

Inside The Unquiet Mind

     Frenchy, explaining things in a way ordinary people may understand, in a manner that the FBI won't come breaking through the door, who is he? 

Who is Dr Jimmy?

Who is he?

Tiny Fair (...) There is no neat doorway into a mind like his. No threshold you can step across and say this is where it began. It is more like a corridor with flickering lights—some doors locked, some swinging open at the wrong moments, all of them echoing. 

He was not born monstrous. That would be too simple, too comforting. Monsters that arrive fully formed let the rest of us feel safe.

He was shaped.

A boy praised too loudly and held too tightly. Told he was special, exceptional—the golden boy—yet never truly seen. His mother hovered, suffocating in her attention, correcting, demanding, loving in a way that felt like control. His father, distant, dismissive, present only in fragments—an outline of authority without warmth. Between them, something fractured early.

Love became confusion. Approval became oxygen. And rage… rage became the only thing that felt entirely his.

As a child, he saw things children should never see. Violence not as a concept, but as a living, breathing force. Raised voices, breaking objects, perhaps worse—moments that carved themselves into him like scratches on glass. No one explained. No one softened it. The world revealed itself as cruel and unpredictable, and he learned one quiet truth:

Control is safety.

But control never came easily.

Inside him, something stirred—an animalistic pulse just beneath the surface. Not constant, not always visible, but there. Waiting. A tightening in the chest, a buzzing behind the eyes, a heat that rose too quickly and left destruction behind it.

He grew into himself the way storms gather—gradually, then all at once.

On the outside, he could still wear the mask. Charming when needed. Calm enough. A man who could pass through a room without drawing suspicion. But inside, resentment fermented. Not just anger—something colder, sharper.

A fixation.

Women, especially, became symbols in his mind. Not individuals, not human in the full sense, but representations of something he could not name without unraveling himself. Control, rejection, expectation—threads tied back to his earliest wounds. The overbearing presence. The unreachable approval. The suffocation disguised as care.

And somewhere deep inside, a quiet hatred of happiness itself.

The image of a perfect family—laughter, warmth, ease—felt like a lie. Or worse, an accusation. Proof of something he had been denied, or perhaps something he believed never truly existed. He did not want it. He wanted to dismantle it.

Because if it wasn’t real, then he wasn’t missing anything.

He kept objects. Not trophies in the theatrical sense—but tools. Hidden things. Practical things. A hammer from his father’s garage, heavy with memory. Cold metal, simple purpose. It carried weight—not just physical, but symbolic. A connection to the man who had been absent, now repurposed into something far more present.

He did not think in terms of plans the way others might imagine. There was no grand design, no elegant pattern he could articulate. Even he might struggle to explain why one moment tipped into another. Why a passing irritation could ignite into something irreversible.

His “method” was not methodical.

It was instinct.

A build-up. A trigger. A release.

And afterward, silence.

Not peace—never peace—but a temporary quieting of the storm. As though something inside him had exhaled. Only briefly. Because it always returned, coiling again, tightening, demanding.

He does not fully understand himself. That is perhaps the most unsettling truth. There is no clean narrative he could offer, no tidy confession that would make sense of it all. Only fragments:

A child praised too much and loved too poorly.

A boy who saw too much and was told too little.

A man who cannot separate control from violence.

And beneath it all, a question he would never ask out loud:

Was I made this way… or did I choose it?

The corridor remains. The lights still flicker. And somewhere in the distance, another door is opening.

Bang! Bang!

 The door breathes open on its hinges, a soft complaint swallowed by the thick, unmoving air. Inside, the house feels abandoned by warmth, as though even the walls have given up trying to remember what comfort once meant. The smell reaches you first—stale tobacco clinging to the curtains, old smoke ground into the fabric of the place, layered over something sour: damp clothes left too long, skin unwashed, time itself decaying in corners.

You step in anyway.

The carpet underfoot is ancient, its fibers flattened by years of footsteps that led nowhere better. It exhales dust with every careful shift of your weight. Somewhere deeper in the house, a pipe ticks faintly, or perhaps it’s just the sound of the cold settling in. The windows are blind with condensation, opaque to the outside world, as if this place has sealed itself off deliberately.

You already know you shouldn’t be here.

The lump hammer feels heavier now, not in your hand but in your mind, its purpose swelling with each step you take down the narrow hallway. A door stands ahead—ajar, just slightly—spilling a thin blade of jaundiced streetlight across the floorboards. It cuts through the darkness like a warning you choose not to read.

You pause.

Listen.

Nothing but breathing.

Two rhythms, uneven but deep, tangled together in sleep. The kind of sleep that comes from exhaustion, not peace. The kind that trusts too easily in the idea that the night will pass without incident.

You push the door wider.

Slowly.

Gently.

Because you don’t want to wake them.

Not yet.

The room greets you with the same suffocating neglect. The bed is unmade, sheets twisted and stained, bodies half-covered, half-exposed to the cold. The air is thick, humid with breath and the residue of lives lived without care. Curtains barely cling to the window, allowing the streetlamp to paint everything in a sickly orange glow.

They don’t stir.

They don’t know.

You stand there, watching, the hammer hanging at your side. There’s a moment—just one—where the world seems to hold itself still. A moment where something inside you hesitates, presses faintly against the path you’ve chosen.

This is where you should have turned.

This is where you should have stepped back into the hallway, eased the door shut, and let the night swallow your presence whole. Left them to their dreams, to their small, fragile existence, untouched by whatever darkness you carry with you.

This is where you should have fled.

But you didn’t, did you?

No.

You did not.

Say Your Prayers - I'm Coming Up Your Stairs

 

     Not the polished kind you recite in daylight, not the tidy sentences you learned as a child, at the boy scouts, but the raw ones—the ones that snag in your throat and scrape on the way out. The kind you whisper when the house feels too quiet, when silence has weight, when the dark seems to lean in and listen.

I’m coming up your stairs.

Step by step, slow enough that you question it. Was that real? Was that the settling of old wood, or something deliberate—measured, patient? You lie there, eyes open, fixed on the ceiling you know so well, suddenly foreign. Your body refuses to move, as if it understands something your mind hasn’t caught up with yet.

Were you thinking that?

That something was wrong long before the first creak. That the night had a different texture, thicker somehow. That your thoughts weren’t entirely your own—that they’d been nudged, guided toward this moment.

Did you say it out loud?

Because sometimes fear escapes before we can contain it. A word, a breath, a half-formed question slipping into the dark. And the dark… it answers. Not in language, not in anything you can repeat, but in presence. In the way the air changes, like a held breath just behind you.

Can you hear it?

Your breathing. No—your breast heaving, sharp and shallow, betraying you. Each inhale louder than the last, each exhale a signal. You try to quiet it, to swallow it down, but panic has its own rhythm. It drums in your ears, a pulse that isn’t entirely yours.

And beneath it—something else.

A second sound.

Not as frantic. Not as human.

How did I know where you were sleeping?

That’s the question, isn’t it? The one that coils around all the others. Because it suggests something worse than chance. Worse than intrusion.

It suggests I’ve been here before.

Maybe I stood at the foot of your bed last night, watching the rise and fall of your chest, learning the cadence of your dreams. Maybe I traced the outline of your room in the dark, memorizing every shadow, every place you might try to hide.

Maybe you felt it then, too—that faint unease, like being observed from just beyond sight. And maybe you dismissed it. Turned over. Closed your eyes tighter.

We always do.

Another step.

Closer now.

The stairs don’t creak anymore. Funny, that. As if the house has decided to help me. As if it’s tired of pretending this is just another night.

You hold your breath.

But it’s too late for silence.

I already know the sound of you.

 

Grey Stones

 The Quiet Machinery of Madness

The road to the asylum is barely a road at all now—just a scar of gravel and weeds that leads nowhere anyone sane would choose to go. The building rises from the earth like something that was never meant to be abandoned, only paused. Grey stone, heavy and unmoving, holds the memory of every voice that ever echoed inside it.

Up close, the paint peels in long, curling strips, like the skin of something trying to shed itself and failing. The windows are blind with dust. No light escapes, and none seems welcome.

Inside, the air is still—too still. Not silent. Never silent.

There are beds in long rows, naked iron frames with thin, decayed mattresses sagging in the middle, as if they still remember the shape of bodies that once lay there. Restraints hang loose from rusted rails. You can almost hear the shift of metal, the restless turning of someone who has long since gone.

A ledger lies open on a desk in the admitting room. Patient records, brittle with age. Names written in careful ink. Diagnoses that read less like medicine and more like judgement.

Melancholia.

Hysteria.

Unruly thoughts.

Excessive imagination.

Someone has scrawled over the margins in frantic loops of charcoal. Words layered upon words until they collapse into darkness. Pages torn. Faces drawn again and again—eyes too wide, mouths stretched into shapes that do not belong to human expression.

The art of the tortured soul is everywhere. On walls, on floors, scratched into wood, pressed into paper. It is not decoration. It is evidence. A record of minds trying to escape themselves.

Further in, the corridors narrow.

There is a room where the machines once lived. Industrial. Clinical. Necessary, they would have said. The tumble dryer still stands against the wall—too large, too heavy, its circular mouth gaping open like it is waiting to be fed.

Inside, something once turned that should never have been placed there.

They found the body days later, they say. Folded into itself in a way no living person could arrange. The report called it an accident. The walls, if they could speak, would disagree.

Beyond that room, the air changes.

It carries something softer. Sadder.

A single teddy bear sits in the corner of a narrow cell. One eye missing. Fur worn thin from hands that must have clung to it long after comfort stopped working. It has been left carefully, not dropped. As if someone meant to come back.

No one did.

And still, the sounds persist.

Not loud. Never loud.

A sigh from behind a locked door that no longer exists. A cry that fades before it fully forms. The shuffle of bare feet along corridors that are now empty. Madness does not leave when the building is abandoned—it settles deeper, becomes part of the walls, the floors, the air itself.

At the far end lies the mortuary steps.

They descend into coldness. Into finality.

This is where the journey ended for many, though it never truly felt like an end. Only another form of silence. The kind that presses in on you, heavy and absolute.

Standing there, you begin to understand something unsettling:

Insanity was never confined to those who were kept here.

It lived in the systems that named it.

In the hands that restrained it.

In the quiet decisions that no one questioned.

And perhaps, most disturbingly..

It lingers still, waiting in places like this, patient and undisturbed, for someone to listen closely enough to hear it breathe. 

He is still here, you can feel his presence. 

The blood, still oozing from his curled lip..

The nightmare (...) It doesn't end.

Jackpot!

 The candle was already burning when I noticed it.

Not brightly—nothing dramatic, no roaring flame of revelation—but low, stubborn, and quietly consuming itself somewhere deep inside the corridors of my mind. A thin wick holding on. A small pool of melted wax gathering beneath it, like time made visible.

“To you, aficionado,” I sometimes think, addressing that inner voice that speaks with confidence I don’t quite trust. The one that dresses uncertainty in bravado. The one that keeps me performing even when I’m alone. It whispers that everything is under control, that the flicker is intentional, artistic even.

But I know better.

Because when the candle burns low, it doesn’t ask permission.

It changes the air.

Thoughts begin to stretch and warp, like shadows cast too long against a wall. Focus slips—not all at once, but in subtle fractures. One moment you’re steady, the next you’re chasing fragments of ideas that refuse to settle. A consciousness explosion, not outwardly visible, but internally deafening. Everything moving, everything shifting, nothing quite landing.

And still, you try to keep your mind in motion.

You pace mentally. You push forward. You convince yourself that movement equals control. That if you just keep thinking, keep analyzing, keep going, the flame won’t die out—or worse, won’t reveal how close it is to doing so.

But the candle doesn’t care about your effort.

It burns according to what it has left.

And that’s the quiet truth most of us avoid: sometimes the struggle isn’t about losing control—it’s about running on what’s nearly gone.

There’s a peculiar vulnerability in that space. You start questioning things you normally wouldn’t. Your confidence thins. Even your sense of self can feel like it’s flickering alongside that flame. You ask yourself:

Is this exhaustion, or is this who I really am underneath everything?

Is there any reason to remain exactly as I’ve been?

The bravado voice will rush in here. It always does. It will tell you to stand tall, to keep up appearances, to not let the flame’s weakness define you.

But maybe—just maybe—that voice is part of the problem.

Because what if the candle burning low isn’t a failure?

What if it’s a signal?

A quiet insistence that something needs to change—not in a dramatic, life-altering way, but in the small, honest ways we often ignore. Rest. Reflection. Letting the mind stop moving for once, instead of forcing it forward like a machine that’s already overheating.

We’re taught to fear the dimming. To associate it with weakness, with losing momentum, with becoming less.

But a candle burning low isn’t the end of light.

It’s a moment of truth.

You can keep pretending the flame is as strong as ever. You can keep performing for that inner aficionado, feeding the illusion of control.

Or you can sit with it.

Watch it flicker.

Acknowledge what’s left (...) and what isn’t.

Because sometimes, the most honest question isn’t “How do I keep going?”

It’s:

Why am I trying so hard not to pause?

And in that pause—uncomfortable, unfamiliar, but real—you might find that the flame doesn’t go out after all.

It steadies.

Not brighter. Not louder.

Just… truer.

So what happened.  What happened that night?

The hammer falling on the sleeping bed, the horror,  the sounds of hell.. In a small house not far from you.

The son of the devil himself,  covering his tracks.

And now we sleep. 

But does he sleep?

No..

The Road by the Bay

 

     The bar closed slowly that night, the way coastal bars often do—reluctantly. Laughter faded in uneven waves, glasses were stacked behind the counter, and the last conversations drifted out into the salt-damp air.

She left a little after midnight.

Her moped sputtered to life outside the bar, its small engine buzzing softly against the stillness of the sleeping village. She wrapped her jacket tighter around herself, glanced once toward the dark water beyond the rocks, and pulled onto the narrow dirt track that curved along the bay.

It was a lonely road.

On one side, jagged rocks fell toward the sea. On the other, low scrub and shadows stretched back toward empty land. The moon hung thin and pale, barely lighting the path ahead. The only sound was the moped’s engine and the slow rhythm of waves brushing the stones.

Somewhere along that track, a man stood waiting in the darkness.

Later, investigators would say he stepped from the shadows and raised a hand, signaling for her to stop. He told police he had asked her for a cigarette. It was a small, ordinary request—the kind strangers make every day. But not on deserted dark roads late at night.

But the night turned violent.

He attacked her there beside the lonely road. When he was finished, he picked up a rock, smashing it into her head, he then dragged her toward the water and pushed her into the bay.

By morning she was discovered floating among the rocks.

Face up.

Her eyes open to the sky.

The sea moved gently around her, the tide rocking her body as if it could not quite decide whether to claim her or return her to the shore. The early fishermen who saw her first said the water was calm that morning, eerily calm, as though the night had swallowed its own secret.

The investigation moved quickly. A local black man who had been hiding along the road was arrested and later, under duress confessed. In court he told the story of how he stopped the moped, asked for the cigarette, and what happened afterward. He had only wanted sex, he hadn't meant to kill her.

He was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang.

Yet one small detail of that night has always lingered in the background, like a quiet footnote in a much darker story.

Just two minutes away from the bar where she had her last drink stood a modest hotel. Its windows faced the same rocky bay where the waves carried her body until dawn.

Inside that hotel, in a room overlooking the water, sat Dr. Jimmy’s father. He was chain-smoking nervously. He was rocking back and forth in his seat, he had been in the bar that night, he had been speaking, laughing, and drinking with the young, dark haired attractive woman. Now she was dead, her skull crushed, her beautiful face destroyed. 

The moped’s engine, the confrontation in the shadows, the splash in the dark water.. Her desperate pleas for her life.. "No, please Jimmy no..."

History often feels distant and dramatic when we read about it later.

But in reality, it happens close by.

Sometimes at home.

Yes, sometimes.

From Locked Rooms to Open Skies

  Escaping a Difficult Beginning..

Some people begin life with a safety net. Others begin with walls.

A difficult upbringing has a way of shaping how a person sees the world. When parents are irresponsible, absent, or lost in their own struggles, a child learns very early that stability is something they must build themselves. Instead of guidance, there is confusion. Instead of safety, there is uncertainty. And instead of trust, there is often a quiet fear that follows you into adulthood.

For many years, I carried that fear with me.

One of the strange remnants of my childhood was a deep discomfort with locked rooms. Closed doors, small spaces without an easy exit — they made me uneasy in ways that were hard to explain. It wasn’t just about physical space. It was about the feeling of being trapped, of having no control over what might happen next.

Children raised in chaos often grow up searching for freedom.

But freedom does not always come from changing your location or your circumstances. Sometimes it begins in the mind.

The biggest journey I have taken in my life has been a mental one — moving upward from the patterns I inherited. I had to learn that the way I was raised did not have to define who I became. The habits, fears, and sadness that were passed down to me were not permanent.

For a long time, depression felt like a shadow that followed everything I did. It whispered that happiness belonged to other people — people who had easier beginnings, stronger families, clearer paths.

But slowly, something changed.

I began to understand that happiness doesn’t have to be dramatic. It doesn’t have to look like wealth, status, or a perfect life. Sometimes happiness is incredibly simple.

It is waking up and feeling calm.

It is walking outside and breathing fresh air.

It is having a small routine that belongs entirely to you.

It is realizing that the chaos of your past no longer controls your present.

A simple lifestyle became my form of freedom. When you grow up with instability, simplicity becomes precious. A quiet home. A cup of coffee in the morning. A walk in the afternoon. These small things carry a kind of peace that once felt impossible.

Healing did not happen all at once. It happened slowly — through small realizations, small choices, and small acts of kindness toward myself.

The locked rooms that once existed in my mind began to open.

And beyond those doors, I discovered something unexpected: a life that may not be perfect, but is truly my own.

Escaping a difficult beginning is not about erasing the past. It is about rising above it — mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

The past built the walls.

But we still hold the key.