Scars of God

The scar of God

Sydney Toph woke up lost and saddened. Moments ago - or perhaps countless lifetimes ago - he had experienced something infinitely more real and intense than anything his waking life provided , yet upon awakening he had forgotten it all. Hopelessly, he tried to recall his dream and the meaning it might have held. He was desperate, and the slightest scrap of recollection wouldve been more than enough for him. All he wanted was a comfirmation of the suspicion that currently festered in his mind, the suspicion that his world may not be nearly as "real" as he'd always thought it was.
It was futility. It was futility though Sydney didnt yet know it was. He would realize this fact in a few moments. And upon realization he would still persist, for more like than not reason yielded to human nature. He tried to think about his dream as intensily as possible without giving himself a headache. Finally he fled from the thoughts when he felt a slight migrain creep through the back of his scalp. He withdrew Just in time to take a few illegible memories with him. So he decided to retreat from tackling the task of recalling the whole dream, instead reducing his goal to trying to decode the convoluted vagueness he brought back along with the migraine he now owned. For now. Sydney Toph was no quitter. Finally, he felt a glimmer of hope - though, in truth it was less of a glimmer and more along the lines of a spark - as he attempted to understand the impossible.
It still wasnt enough. Even at the most vague and abstract levels he had trouble recalling. The only things he could even slightly remember were things that werent truly definable in a sense but were rather intense feelings and perhaps a few shapes. He almost didnt feel like bothering at all with the stress that thinking about it would surely produce. It was a trap he was sure. Slowly he began to feel the design and sense the form of the trap. He knew pondering feelings that he was presently incapable of translating into rational coherency or shapes he suspected were false memories crafted by his mind would only win him a headache. No he would not allow himself to fall for this trap. Yet it was fairly obvious to Sydney that these feelings and shapes would heavily influence - and might have always influenced - the decisions he made and his perception of the world around him. Naturally, this frustrated him endless, for he was forced to accept that he had surrendered his free will to shapes and feelings that he not only couldnt recall, but were most likely incomprehensible in the first place. So he tried his best to currently forget about the whole thing, leave the traps and fultilities for another time , yet as he pulled himself up from his bed, he remembered a definable something at once.
A single line that perhaps stretched forever.

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In a certain cave a certain corpse lies in wait. Were one to muster the audacity to merely look at it one would immediately see the story of the person that was felled, leaving only a husk. Something that comes to mind and one of the more prominent of the corpse's scars is this. From the top of it's back to the waist, you will see a myriad of - It would be a futility to count them- thick lines travelling down it's form. There are those who call these lines the scars of God.

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My situation is most unsavory. A lesser man would have long gone mad if he'd only glimpsed at what Ive seen - see - at what I can only settle to define as - for I lack a better word - a living hell. Not merely a realm hospitable to the wretched and those that fall into masochistic tendencies but a sentience in itself that derives - what I can only speculate to be - a feint pleasue from observing it's residents despair at whatever travesty is deliberated by it. Ive settled upon a name for this entity.
The line.
Presently, I am inflicted with the observation of a woman exuding an awe-inspiring amount of lust. She is smiling at me. Perhaps it would be said by some that the smile itself is meaningless, but they know not what the smile is, what the unholy form of her mouth communicates, what it violates, what her snicker implies. I do. I know. I know and I know that she knows and knows that I know. I can only close my eyes, hoping she isnt still there, still smiing. Yet perhaps such thoughts are pointless. The intellectual equivalence of erecting two mirrors to face one another and gazing at the eternal reflection for no particular reason. Thankfully, this current thought has allowed me to recall my habitual crutch. A sort of puzzle that has seen me through worse terrors than my current one.
In truth it's merely a peculiar musing. It is the only musing - fantasy rather- in my possesion to to destract me from my current horrors. A dream I cannot necessarily recall. All attempts to decode it have left my mental faculties debilitated. Perhaps the debilitation in itself has always been what I seek, nevertheless, the dream -I am sure - is a topic of discussion that would cultivate much academic debate. I dream about the line and attempting to transgress it.
However, nothing else is even partially legible. Once, in my dreamy wanderings I happened upon the form of the line. This act was much more fool hardy than it would appear upon an initial observation. For upon observing its form, I gradually began to understand that the line stretches - not only infinitly - but past infinty itself. How I realized this, I do not currently know. The unconcentrated grinding madness of this revelation rendered me temporarily befuddled and all memories of my experience were confiscated by the depths of oblivion. For a while my perceptions were reduced to - what I hope were random -colors, some more numerable than what any human could possibly percieve, and fluctuating wave lengths. Upon being transported from my sleep induced nightmare and into my waking one, the contents of my stomach immediately vacated orally. This was my first and - more like than not - last attempt to observe the line.
Now allow me to indulge myself with my theory of the line's origin.
How should I say this...How could I possibly commit such a concept to paper?... I can only settle for this meager and unworthy anology, for I am sure it does not truly explain the nature of the line, though perhaps there is nothing that can.
I woud like to imagine that the line is the work of a particularly unhinged architect. An individual in possession of a warped mind that produced the deranged design. During an age of understanding predating language, he took to the idea of creating a line stretching past infinity - the reason being nothing more than intellectual curiousity - and abandoned his construction - though this is merely a lie on my part as the line truthfully exists and I am merely having another fit of denial - In his drafting stages. Upon measuring and designing the unholy thing he recoiled in horror at what he had done, the incorrect idea he had created and could never kill. A man possessing an ounce more rationality would have have killed himself, ending his line then and there - perhaps he did - nevertheless the architect died in obscurity I assume, not bothering to hide his poisonous draft on the basis that it would take a mind more deranged than his to see to it's creation. He was right, unfortunately. At some point in time, a man who should have been strangled by his umbilical cord were justice inherent in this world , did it. It is perhaps an intellectual pit fall to speculate on the date of when the line was constructed, so I will not bother to, the matter of importance is that the line was constructed. It exists.
It doesnt.
I no longer hear the snicker. Or the grinding of her teeth. Teeth where there should be none. Yet perhaps she is merely playing games with me. Perhaps she is simply being silent - absolutely silent - to fool me. Then perhaps I shant open my eyes. I wont.

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Absolute silence is nothing unusual in this particular cave. The same is to be said for the absence of light. It is to be expected. As should the smell, it is simply impossible to ignore the smell.

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"Something smells like shit."
Sydney had not meant for those words to come from his lips. It was supposed to be safely contained in his mind alone. Neither was he the type to curse whether thinking or saying it out loud or writing it down on paper. He firmly believed cursing was merely a crutch for people who didnt know half as many words as they should. Still, the fact was that he had said it, and in front of his mother no less.
"E-excuse me?!"
"Hm...?What?"
He didnt have many practical fears - he wasnt afraid to fight people he knew without a doubt he couldnt beat for example - but he was particularly afraid of his mother. Sydney always wanted to appear pure and even perfect in front of her. He knew the notion of behaving this way was completely ridiculous at best and asanine at worse, yet still it didnt stop him from trying. As Sydney tried his best to feign ignorance he felt a slight sting of self loathing creep up inside him, not merely for attempting to decieve his mother, but also for shamelessly disowning his actions, pretending it never happened. He even fooled himself for an instance that he had never said that. That merely made it hurt worse. Sydney would have truly liked to believe he was above such cowardly behavior, yet the evidence of his immediate reaction reaction spoke for itself.
Thankfully, his mother had not truly been listening to what he initially said so she merely attributed his word to be her hearing things and a lack of sleep on her part. Sydney realized this and felt relieved, but quickly felt asmamed for feeling relief in the first place. For a moment he considered the idea of simply confessing to his mother to end all of these insecure feelings then and there, he was 17 almost a grown man - practically a grown man - and he was already tired of the feelings he made himself feel by decieving his mother. As he considered it, he walked towards his mother in the kitchen, their eyes met each other the first time that day and at that instant the idea fled from his thoughts.
Sydney's mother for her part, regardless of her son's actual character , occasionally allowed herself to be indulged by the fantasies of her son she fabricated. In her mind, the vast majority of Sydney's words were "fuck" or included some variation of it when he wasnt around her, he had experimented with practically ever drug at his age and she assumed that he had an illegitimate child or two. Sydney's mother was only 32 years old herself, it wasnt long ago that she was a teenager herself. Still, he was her baby and she would accept anything he did and everything she pretended he did.
As Sydney motioned himself over to the breakfast table, he realized that he couldnt keep up his act for long. There was truly some rank smell floating in the air, it wasnt merely a stench, it was putrid. Sydney, unfortunately ws petrified of even bringing anything smell related to his mother's attention after his little word slip. He didnt even have the heart to pick up the air freshener can, which lay a mere six inches from him for fear that the use of it would imply to his mother that he had said that "something smells like shit". Instead, he opted to destract himself , by making an observation of the kitchen. There was dish washing liquid less full than empty, twelve bowls and plates plus twenty one spoons and forks - all needing to be washed - a few rags - four he decided - a shrine of Sydney's report cards laid prominently on the refrigerator, three boxes of cereal and something really stunk. Sydney knew he couldnt keep his act up for long and so as his eyes wandered unconsciously towards the microewave in the kitchen he immediately thought of a quick way out of the situation.
"Mom, I just remembered that I need to get to school earlier today. So I dont have time to eat breakfast today." Sydney said, strangely feeling no guilt for lying to her the second time in comparison to the first.
Before she even had the chance of responding he was out of the kitchen door.

To get to school Sydney would need to walk two blocks down from the street he lived on and wait for the Y bus. Afterwards, he would get off at X bus terminal and probably need to wait around fifteen minutes for the Z bus to come as it virtually always came every half hour and the time - from when Sydney had glanced at the microwave, which was five minutes ago - had been 7:13 AM. If he continued at this pace and went to school, he knew he would be at least half an hour early for school. That is, of course , if the time on the microwave was correct.Sydney, though , wasnt actually headed for school so tthe thought was more annoying to him than reassurring. In truth, he had been skipping school for two weeks. Ultimately he had decided to put academic studies aside for the moment and turn his focus towards the selling of drugs.
Regardless of the fact that he had learned no less on the cornors he dwelled on then at anytime he'd ever gone to school and that selling narcotics involvd far more critical thinking - at least for Sydney - he still felt a pulpable sense of wrongfullness in all aspects of his being. He had already felt that he should, regardless of the nature of any particular circumstance, always tell the truth to her, now in light of his recent activities lying to his mother - crafting the smallest fib or half truth - ran the risk of inducing nausea for Sydney. The deceit was only a part of his guilt. Concerning his mother, he felt that he'd irrivocably wronged her for all the years that she spent nurturing him - all the things she had sacrificed and all the things he speculated that she had sacrificed for his sake. He was certain that she - then 19 - must have sacrificed many of her asperations from the moment he was born. That she took pride in Sydney's achievements and aspirations as if they actually were her own - though in most ways they were - yet he had killed them, he felt. He had killed her aspirations for a second time.
Sydney was sure that his guilt was at least partially unfounded. He was no fool. He knew the difference between wrongfullness and illegal activity and he was certain that he felt bad for selling drugs mostly because society had taught him to feel bad. After all, he had always felt that the arguments against selling drugs were generally transparent such as the insinuation that drug dealers were somehow responsible for their client's drug addiction. As far as Sydney was concerned, it was a choice. He wasnt forcing anyone to buy from him and regardless of Nevertheless, what mattered was that he did feel bad and - regardless of his efforts to justify or rationalize - there was nothing he could to shake that feeling. Rationality had yielded to human emotion.
The actual motivation for his actions was simple. For months, Sydney's mother had been unemployed and she could not find any suitable work - even work that she was clearly overqualified for -despite holding a masters degree in nursing and twenty years of work experience. Furthermore, the unemployment compensation she recieved had effectively dried out two months ago with no renewal. This obviously put Sydney and his mother's way of life in jeapordy. As a result Sydney had both matured quite a bit and become darkly motivated.
Sydney had realized something he, in retrospect, felt shameful for not realizing sooner. The truth had been so bare and cruel that upon his initial realization he had almost been provoked to actual tears.To put figuratively, Sydney visualized himself living a dream, a dream where he was falling. Despite the dilemma the situaion might at first appear to be, he realized that there was a sort of security found in such dreams. Regardless of how bad things got, he knew that he would wake from his present situation, he would never be in a situation where he fell to his doom. He knew he would wake up. In the midst of falling he knew he would wake up. Even after impacting the ground, he knew he would wake up. The same just simply couldnt be said for his mother. If she began falling or even showed the slightest signs that she would begin falling - which he now saw her doing - she would surely meet her end.
His mother was vulnerable - she had been completely vulnerable his whole life.
she lived in reality, where failure was no option. This horrified him beyond belief. He was surprised that such a simplistic truth could evoke such terror in his heart. He suspected somewhat that he, perhaps , always knew this truth subconsciously yet somehow had repressed it - drew a line stretching endlessly in order to separate himself from it. Nevertheless, the truth lay naked - revealed - no longer protected by a flaming sword. And with that knowledge he could never turn back or regress, there was nothing he could do and no lie sweet enough to convince him that what he'd deduced wasnt true. The evidence was too compelling - too violent - for him to disregard. Perhaps becaue of that revelation he allowed himself - perhaps subconsciously - to be on equal standings with his mother. For he knew that if he slipped up in selling marijuana even just a bit he would fall and there would be no saving him, no awakening and no future.
Before he began selling drugs, Sydney had never realized how simplistic his personal moral code actually was. Essentially, anything he did for people he cared about was morally permissable while failing to protect those he cared for was morally repulsive. Selling drugs or selling children it hinestly did not matter to him, Sydney knew at least one absolute truth about himself, he knew that he was honestly capable of committing anything - no matter how repulsive - in the name of protecting those he cared for and regardless of all the grief it brought him, he was at least grateful that merchandising narcotics set his priorities straight.
As Sydney made a turn at the end of the block, he passed by a girl, perhaps 16 years old. Their eyes met for an instance and he immediately saw fear in her face. For a second he was puzzled as the girl hurried past him. Then he realized that he had been grimacing for a very long time, as he could feel the soreness in his face - the tension in his brow and cheeks. He had ofcourse been obsessing over his situation as of late. He decided to think of a more benign topic of discussion. This was much more easier than he thought it would be. The girl had already planted the idea of a scary face in his mind and he began amusing himself by picturing scary faces in his mind. He thought of this one particular man he had sold about fifty dollors worth of marijuana to.
He had been wary of the man, not because of his face -or rather the tattoos on his face - but because of the slang he used. If a client didnt requist for marijuana by calling it "pot", "herb", "weed" and "green" he wouldnt sell it to them. He was wary of other people from the onset and went through drastic and extensive measures to protect himself or cover his tracks.He'd thought of quitting his deranged survey at least twice a day but he carried on anyway, for Sydney Toph was no quiter. Sydney had decided to commit to memory for a week every single term people used when approaching him for illegal substances. After a week he concluded that all of the people he had bartered with used one of four terms. "Pot", "herb" "weed" and "green". Dedicating those four terms to memory was the closest effort he made to establishing a relationship between himself and his clients and a person that didnt use any of the listed terms was met immediately with suspicion as if they were a tourist or foreigner. He had debated whether or not to allow the term "cabbage" into his narcotic related vocabulary after one person had used it, but ultimately he decided against it, he was damned if he would dedicate an extra term to memory just for one person.
When the man with the tattoos on his face approached Sydney with a serious business look upon his features then inquired - with a straight face - in a raspy Clint Eastwood-like voice if he was "selling any spinach", Sydney blushed in hilarity, doing his best to quickly compos himself in order to take out his merchandise. Sydney didnt regard this man much with any suspicion, he reasoned that if the police were trying to set him up then they would at the very least have used slang that wasnt outright laughable.
Naturally, Sydney's thoughts wandered pointlessly to his philosophy on tattoos. The temptation of possessing a tattoo sometimes possessed him at times. He would research for days potential tattoos or symbols he possibly wouldnt mind binding to his flesh forever. However, he never quite found a symbol which carried a meaning that he thought would always represent some aspect of him. Years down the line, he hypothesised, he would one day wake up and realize in despair that the tattoo affixed to him was irreconcilable to his current self, that one day, the tattoo would reflect who he was in the past not who he is. This was his main contention with tattoos. A tattoo was a symbolic statement and a validation - at least when it wasnt a sexy peice of art - of something he could not convey orally or in a written language.Yet he always concluded that the notion of the flow of time itself would inevatably invalidate the statement he made. Somewhere - he wasnt quite sure where - he learned that every cell currently contained in the human body would one day die seven years from then - that a person is literally a completely different being every seven years - and from that revelation he knew he could never find a tattoo that would always represent who he is and not who he was. However, once he did get the misguided idea to get a tattoo of a circle - the form of something forever changing - but the act of getting a tattoo of a circle is - not merely was - asanine, he thought. Currently, Sydney couldnt help but chuckle.
Sydney found himself smiling slightly, his mood brightening more and more every moment. He imagined that his - slightly - cheerful appearance likely looked completely out of place in the opressive atmosphere he currently resided in. Indeed, the entire block exuded joylessness. From the now obscured signatures writ in concrete the sidewalks cracking apart the pavement, to the drab discolored rotten paint on the walls of the closed shops, the whole area reaked - even literally in parts - of ruination. Sydney couldnt quite conclude which was more irreconcilable, the pavement cracking apart the sidewalk or his own temperament refusing to conform to the sorriness surrounding him. For some reason he felt that because his current mood couldnt be rigidly defined as misery he had committed some great sin and the ridiculousness of that very notion amused him all the more.
As Sydney confidently - but cautiously - paced down the block he noticed how rotten the paint was. In some parts the paint was a bleachy white or even green. He speculated - Sydney had the sense not to touch it - that the paint would likely fall apart if he even slightly brushed his hand against the wall. And just that instant it actually did. A large sheet of rotten paint lapsed over from the wall of the Church/Hospital/laundromat - at one paint or another it had been at least one of the three - barely a foot ahead of him. The painted sheet didnt entire fall to the floor, rather it nodded and slumped forward from the top like a dead man being nudged, the bottom half still attached to the wall.
Sydney was surprised to see that a mural - or rather the remans of a mural - was concealed within the thick and thin strip of a paint on the church/hospital/laundromat. The whole image was surreal, much of the paint had been pulled off the mural from the now slumped over sheet of paint. What remained was a ghastly image of the building's past. Sydney deduced that the mural was a painting of a group of children reaching and embracing the sky from an isometric perspective from the overall form of the painting. Sydney thought it was peculiar if not outright strange for an artist to employ such a perspective for a mural as it was but now the painting had two uniquely different macabre effects depending how one looked at it. In both cases the rotten paint added to the effect. Instead of reaching towards the sky it now appeared as if these children had been buried beneath the first layer of paint and had been desperately and vainly attempting to claw their way to the surface like a man finding himself buried alive. Yet it was clearly far too late, the contorted faces and disfigured anatomy made clear the outcome of the attempt to reach the surface.
The second interpretation was equally haunting in it's imagery. Instead of children attempting to claw themselves out of their place of necropolic slumber it appeared that the children were inviting the observer -Sydney - to join them. This had quite a chilling - yet somehow intentional - effect on Sydney, and he had suspicions on whether or not the artist knew his work would one day be coveredt over, whether or not this effect was the artist's true intent. The depiction of a sort of sick joke. The thought repulsed him.
Since only a square of the paint had fallen off, much of the mural lay submerged in spoiled paint. Sydney dared not pull down the rest fearing the potential horrors that awaited within. It was one line he would much rather not tresspass. Sydney noticed his heart beginning to beat more rapidly and he quickly decided that it was best he distance himself from the picture.
Eventually, Sydney found himself getting ever closer to his secret inventory. Sydney did not plan to get caught and so he took often times disturbing measures to protect himself. One such measure was the method in which he hid things related to his drug dealing activities. Sydney hid his money and drugs in the trunk of a seemingly abandoned car. Perhaps for most, that precaution alone would have been more than enough to maintain a sense of security, but not for Sydney. Sydney had concluded that someone - either competition or an addict or even police if things got bad enough -could possibly break the back of the trunk open and take both the drugs and money. Thus, Sydney had decided to build a hollow in the trunk to hide the drugs in. He removed the speaker system - which was already functionless - from the trunk of the car and instead built a secret compartment within the hollowed speaker section. On top of this Sydney put an empty locked safe inside of the trunk as a red herring in the event that it was discovered that he hid drugs in his trunk. The safe would fulfil it's function as a distraction - fooling the thief into stealing the empty safe - while the actual contents rested safely in the secret compartment. Topping this off, Sydney sometimes drove the car around to change the location of his inventory when he felt that his things had been in one area for far too long. He had no driver's license nor any paperwork and license plate for the car so he only drove it around rarely.
Inside the secret compartment would be fifteen hundred dollars worth of marijuana, seven hundred dollars and a handgun with eight bullets. Sydney constantly checked his inventory. He knew for a fact that he made about three hundred dollars a day and took one hundred dollars for his own cut. Fifteen hundred dollars of marijuana was distributed to him per week, in other words, it was meant for him to sell three hundred dollars worth a day. The gun was exclusively for protective purposes. He didnt treat it like a toy. He only armed himself when he began selling and hid it when he was done for the day.
However he practiced his routine to make sure no one was following him by bending over to pretend to tie his shoes while taking the advantage to look between his legs.
There was a woman standing directly behind him by five feet, she was smiling.
Sydney felt immediately that he had encountered the woman from somewhere before but wasnt quite certain where exactly.Perhaps she was simply another one of his clients, he thought, trying to put his finger on where he'd met this person from. He was fumbing to get some handle on this puzzle and as he stood up straight to directly confront the woman, he felt a chill travel up his spine when he looked at her face. She was quite beautiful in actuality, so much that it would have been completely pointless and redundant to comment on her physical appearance. She was so blatantly attractive, Sydney thought , that she would have most certainly been considered beautiful by any civilization at any point in time. Strangely, Sydney couldnt quite put his finger on what exatly made her so attractive in the first place. Like an artist trying desperately - and failing - to capture the subject's likeness, Sydney couldnt construct a single sentence that could clearly describe her features. Her appearance was so specific that uttering more than a handful of words to describe her would have produced a radically different image than her actual appearance. In the end, he could only say five words about her that were true.
She was beautiful and familiar.
As they stood there next to the alleyway, Sydney at once noticed the lasting silence between the both of them. Sydney browsed his mind to think of some subject - any subject to end the silence. Then he stopped when he realized it was pointless when there was a very prominent question he wanted to ask her.
"Hey have I seen you before? y'know, like, have we maybe met or something."
Silence.
"...Um, so do you like greenery by any chance?"
Silence.
"O-or herbs and stuff?"
Silence.
Sydney decided that the woman was stoned out of her mind and that the more questions left unanswered the more confused he would be. As he considered going about his business, the woman gave Sydney the most prominent look. Instantly, though he could not determine why, he was filled with a pure sense of paronoia. What he felt, he could not necessarily identify, yet the feelings it evoked were vaguely familiar to him. For some reason he knew the smile to be some sort of silent meme and terrible motif, he knew that there was something truly t communicated within the space of thatt silent look, yet it was simply impossible to understand what exactly it was.
Unfortunately there was another undesirable familiarity he felt and he immediately recognized what it was as soon as the familiarity began to wander from the back of his scalp and begin settling at the base of his brow. He felt both infinitely light and weighted down so much that he thought every bone in his body would shatter at any moment, The last conscious thing he felt was his body double back into a wall. This time the intensity of the headache was in it's full debilitative effect. Immediately his vision began to blur and he began envisioning a series of flashing lights. The order of the colors and the speed - sometimes lasting less than the span of an instant and at other times lasting horridly undefinable lengths - most certainly appeared completely random and he had no reason at all to think there was any sort of pattern to the images flashing through his mind, still he insisted for some unknown reason - or desire - that there was meaning in what he saw.
At some point in time - possibly ranging from even before the colors began flashing in his mind to even after he saw the bloated and illuminated corpse in the cave - Sydney was transitioned into an expansion of perpetual flatness.
At this point, Sydney was no longer capable of feeling his face, though his whole body was numb yet frigidly cold. He felt himself slip into a state where time stopped, where time had never even started, yet at the same time he felt himself become pulled apart and pushed together simultaneously in all directions endlessly. He was stagnant and travelling at a stunning momentum. It was firmly impossible to approximate or even roughly estamate how fast he went, yet what was certain was that he - or at least a part of himself - was headed to some destination.
Finally, he saw himself. he saw himself in third person and first person, isometrically and from eleven different dimensions and dimensionals and perspectives he could scarcily define. He saw himself from a myriad of angles There he stood in a cave devoid of silence and there on a generally flat boulder lay a bloated corpse. There was a flicker of light emanating from it.
And then he woke.
Though his body itself had been brought back, the function of his observational senses had been left behind. He could not see, hear, taste and smell, feel or even access his own memories. The debilitating effects lasted exactly five minutes. and slowly Sydney began to feel his senses return. First his sense of touch, then taste and smell, then his memories returned and finally Sydney began to regain his identity. After his memories were regained Sydney became increasingly anxious and needy and regressive - to the point of even forgetting how to breathe for twenty seconds - until his hearing and vision finally returned. At that moment he became aware that he was on his knees trembling while hugging the wall of a building with his back. When he turned to see what he had been holding onto, he saw that he was embracing the wall with the children trying desperately to escape or trying desperately to pull someone into their world - depending on how a person looks at the mural - and immediately he leaped away from it.
When he managed to recollect himself he saw that the familiar woman was gone.

Sweat was thick and sticky on his brow and nose. He immediately wiped his face and saw a drip of blood in the palm of his hand. There was almost an ounce of blood streaming from his left nostril. Despite the fact that it was only a miniscule amount, Sydney was intensely disturbed. He considered going back home for a moment but he felt incapable of making up an excuse to tell his mother.
"Drugs." Sydney concluded.
"No, mind altering drugs."
He didnt believe it but he didnt necessarily care either. When it came to this particular issue, he needed an explanation and it mattered little whether or not it was true. At the moment, he would allow himself to believe his lies for he was currently in no form to solve this puzzle.
"But when did she slip me som- Oh, right, it could have been when my back was turned. She was definitly in range..." Sydney decided that this was the truth and he was finished with - or wanted to be finished with - the topic. Yet as he stumbled towards the trunk of his illegitamate and obscured car, he couldnt help pondering the thought that he had perhaps subconsciously pondered many times over all day. A single lingering flicker of a doubt.
For some reason he couldnt recall how he had gotten to that place he called his bedroom this morning. Everything before that was completely blank - not fuzzy but nonexistent - and he was certain for no reason at all that his hair was quite a bit longer now then it had been before. Only, he had no memory of what "before" exactly was and thus his suspicions were untestable.
And then instantly he did and he could recall anything and everything he did before the morning. He remembered the long scars that stretched across his back too. So he went about his business and as he reached in his pocket fumbling his keys to the trunk of the car - his secret inventory - he knew that all of his doubts were unfounded and that they always had been.

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During the first day of ruination you will see a flicker of light eminate from the body. Sometimes you will see two flickers. In either case it will be gone in an instant. The lucidity will dissipate faster then it manifested and it will be as if it had never happened in the first place. All there will be is absolute silence.

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I have not yet decided when I will open my eyes. And now more than ever I am certain someone sneers at me and my ever increasing dillemma at this very moment. Yes, my dilemma. Not merely the ravages of war itself but the civility I am to face it with in order to delay the inevitability of my death. They would have me stand dignifully in a burning structure. I speak not entirely figuratively either, I have seen them commit acts of even greater heart breaking cruelty. I only take solace in the fact that they lack the creative ingenuity to do so. Perhaps I will live to see a day more, my captors do enjoy this charade - the illusion that we the imprisoned still maintain some semblance of honor. A more prideful man - or simply one less craven - would have long taken his life in protest of what they demand. They demand we pretend to and I obey only to prolong
Of late I have taken to withdrawing within my ever increasing fits of madness. I am most grateful when the instant that the insanity takes me. I care not for the destination - though I am certain there is none for it's all pointlessness - what matters is only that I am taken. The most terrible irony, I think , is that my situation is no better when I am dreaming