NOBODY, DISTRICT ONE [DONE]

Awaken;

dust in my mouth, fear in my heart.

It felt like stardust; it felt like torture. Burning, all over, yet I couldn't know the pain of coming too close to an unguarded flame. Only h o t. Needles sticking into palms, pinpricks of blood that did not exist, merely left their searing lacerations deep within youthful bones. That much, I could feel.

Dizzying, the way too many emotions flooded an incomprehensible mind all at once - a tsunami that could only be described as w e t. It would take time to rebuild the self that was irrevocably lost in the devastation, and whilst memories had disintegrated as I'd emerged from the ruins, somewhere, speaking was comfortable. Breathing was peaceful and thinking was calming, to be in control of something, even if I couldn't understand the feeling anymore.

Being buried alive is not a hopeful way to start a story, yet it is mine.

When I had asked the strangers on the street why I'd been buried beneath the rubble of tragedy aftermath, they told me it was an earthquake. I asked their names, 'Fox, Henri, Zedd,' and when I had asked for mine, they had walked away.

They offered no recollection of what had been lost beneath the suffocating debris. It was a system: life. They owed me nothing; they did not know me. But most important, I did not know myself.

We never saw each other again.

Stones in my lungs, and I couldn't breathe. What was left of an eleven-year-old's benign life came to dry upon tear-stained cheeks. I couldn't breathe, eleven, could only marvel at the way the two sticks of numerals stuck in my head, and how every number leading up to the first chapter of "Life As It Was Now Known" was drowned out by the sound of nothing. Nothing in my head, and maybe there was a drone of distant buzzing from some concussed piece of me I couldn't reach. Like the last moments before wisps of air were squeezed from lightweight lungs; before the world went dark; before I woke with stones in my lungs, and I couldn't breathe.

Walking on wobbly legs, there's some remnant of a fire embellished within this pale chest, but without the wind we cannot see which way the smoke blows, tracing the path home.

It hurts. Searching the streets for a sign that never comes, rediscovering a foreign world, trying to make up for the chapters lost along the way. Emerging from the depths of fetal hibernation with nothing but the clothes on your back entrusted to the name you can't remember.

Begin again.

The only prospect of survival for a child, alone and barely eleven, was a new beginning, and there's nothing of a past to search for after a live burial - there is no fear.

By the time I was twelve, I'd learnt to rely upon padded footsteps and bones that folded into tiny spaces to make a life of streetrat thievery. Instincts, not knowledge, for there was too much to learn and too little time to be taught within. It started with forgotten jackets and meaningless broken memoirs, all tossed from windows of high-rise apartments in the midst of fights. It snowballed. Half loaves of bread, plucked from strolling bags passing by the gutters of sidestreet abandonment. Keys, that could unlock fortunes and secrets behind doors otherwise unpenetrable.

I told myself it was for survival.

By the time I was thirteen, I knew the streets of District One as if they were corridors in a mansion that could have been mine, in a lost life. The faces blurred when they passed by - people change, but the pavement never does.

By the time I was fourteen, I'd learnt to pick the locks off of doors with nothing more than a bent spoon and bony fingers. A collection of stolen keys were nothing more than loose baggage; I tossed them all away, washed my hands of the corrosion and accumulated rust as I watched them sink to shelter in a river of mysterious blue depths I could never find the heart to delve into.

When I was fifteen, I found a home.

I wasn't looking for one. Didn't need one. Was content to live out of tattered clothes in alleyway dead-ends, out of sight, just as I'd perfected. Sneaking into abandoned homes, slinking back out again as quickly as I'd entered. Never making a mistake. Never caught.

Until I did. Until I was.

When I was fifteen, and I picked the lock of a bleak building, desperate for food that I hadn't eaten in three days. Protruding ribcages screamed as I searched through cupboards with all the craft of an expert thief. Too young, too hungry, to forget to close the front door, picked with a stiff blade of grass and a penny.

The hands around my neck were the first indication that I'd missed something, that I wasn't as invincible as I'd rebuilt myself to be. Then came the eyes, peeking from interior crevices where the light did not quite reach - too many eyes, in the dark. Straining against a swirling blackness of suffocation, turning to look into a final pair of eyes, gasping for air with the downpour of muffled senses.

It felt like being buried all over again.

Like stardust.

Like torture.

He let go.

A smile.

A nod.

A hand, extended.

Darkness, again.

And then, light.

Introductions and initiations and jobs to fulfil. He lets us live as we've learned to survive for so many years. He doesn't believe in breaking us down, like other pack leaders may. He builds us up to succeed, and at the time of each setting sun, we repay him with the skills we've mastered. Greatness from misery. Transformation. Metamorphosis.

Boys, to m e n, coming into adulthood. My brothers. Some kind of twisted family that didn't fit with the definition which was missing from my mind, but I couldn't turn away. Boys, clumsy and criminals and alone, forever alone. Sharing secrets and crimes as easily as the air we breathed in, breathed out, yet on the mornings we awoke to one less breathing body, as it happened often, we never mourned the disappearance. We shared so much; we were so alone.

They call me Nobody because they deemed it appropriate for a boy built from nothing. The boy who knew nothing. Not important. Nobody.

'Do you remember much? About before?'

On a timeline of our existence, I couldn't tell where after begins.

'No.'

There are tremors in my bones; they come and go, sending tiny vibrations through my fingertips. Like the whole world is on the verge of collapse. Like I'll lose the universe where I built a kingdom of nothing from the jagged edges of reality incarnate. Like I'll be buried alive, engulfed by a fear that still haunts my dreaming mind.

A fear that destroyed more than I'd ever known I'd had.

They call me Nobody because for four years, that's all I'd been.

Four years of anonymity, living without a name. Hoping to regain something that was lost, but to no avail.

You give up. You remember you've never had a family, never belonged, and that those facts will never change. That family is just a word we tell ourselves to feel safe - as if we need someone else to protect us. But time passes. It doesn't stop for those that struggle to move forward.

They offered me a name and I wore it without complaint.

'What's your name, kid?'

I'm not a kid, not anymore.

'I don't know.'

They call me Nobody because that's who I am.

Who I have been.

Who I will forever be.

But maybe not who I was.

table: zoë