The Abhorrent

Introduction

 I decided a long time ago crying was pointless. You have a moment of weakness and all you get out of it is a sore throat, wet cheeks, and puffy eyes. And to add to that you don't feel any better afterward than you felt before.

That's why I didn't cry when the war started and everything around me that had a breath of hope to become normal crumbled. When the enemy entered our country and took control, I didn't cry. 

At first no drastic shift in our lifestyle occurred. We still went on with our daily lives going to school and work only now we reported to different authorities. This did not last long, they became more and more powerful, exterminating any person, object, or idea they deemed threatening. They forced the strongest of us to go to war - fighting on their side. At the time I was too young to be drafted, however, the rest of my family wasn't as lucky. My mother was first. When she left I didn't say goodbye. I didn't want to believe the inevitable because my young mind had yet to grasp the concept of death. It believed my mother was invincible. I thought she would change everything and we could go back to normal once she came back. I was wrong and quickly proven so when we received a letter within a month of her departure stating her life had ended and that we must send a someone from our family to fight in her place immediately. My father refused to go. He claimed it was necessary to protect me, but even at my young age I knew better. He was a coward and nothing more. He didn't want to die and he didn't care what sacrifices had to be made to meet his ends. My older brother was forced to go, leaving me alone with our father with front row seats to the demolition of not only our lives, but our reality.

Ten days later when my town went up in flames I didn't cry, and when the men in their uniforms carried me and any other surviving children away I didn't cry. I was relieved to be brought away from my father and his cowardice. To this day I don't know which side these people were on and I didn't care. At the time, I was incapable of understanding the magnitude of the situation I was in. They held us captive in inhuman conditions and took so many samples from us I was surprised there was anything left. They took the weak first in an attempt to weed out the faults in their systems. This proved to be pointless as the first generation of the failing experiments were quickly dead. 

I was not changed until the seventh generation, the only successful generation. The last generation. They called us the aberrant. The abilities they gave us were meant to be small and manageable, but as they manipulated these changes to fuse better with our DNA we became stronger then they imagined possible. That was their mistake. They gave us abilities they didn't understand, that we didn't understand, in hopes that they could control us and that we would do their bidding. They were wrong. They underestimated our power and overestimated their own. We overtook them easily but the damage had already been done. we were permanently changed and there was nothing we could do about it.

Very few of us were impervious to the whispers of control, a thirst for power, and the others were vengeful opportunists who overpowered the destruction of the war with ease. They controlled the remaining naturals in compounds and allowed the aberrant to live how they chose. Inside in a position power and wealth, or on the outside without law. 

I chose the life I am in now. The life I deserve. Solitude and uncertainty among the rubble of the world and the danger of the few like myself who could not bear to go on in the apex of inhumanity. I couldn't accept our new reality. In a way that was my way of coping. For a long time I felt that if I didn't want it to happen then it wouldn't. I didn't realize just how wrong I was until it was to late. I was in denial. I knew it then and yet I still didn't want to face it. I was numb. I suppose I was lucky to have become numb before the naturals took us, numb to anything that happened to us. 

The unfortunate truth about reality is that no matter how much you want it to change or disappear, it just continues existing. I know the truth now. So now, years later, I cried. I cried for the life we never had. I cried for the love I never found. I cried for my mother and my brother, I cried for my world, and I cried for myself. I was selfishly consumed by the tears for the lives that had ended so abruptly. I cried because I didn't understand what the powers of the world had against me to take away my life as it could have been without the war. To rob me of any chance of living the life I needed.  And while I cried, I hated myself for doing so because now I could never go back to where I had been before, in a state of parallel oblivion.  A place where I was unaware of pain, of suffering, and of uncertainty.

Back then I didn't understand that it could all be over in the blink of an eye, that a moment of solitude could evolve into eternity if you weren't careful. I didn't understand that pain and death and anger are hovering over our lives waiting for the most opportune moment to strike and take away the only joy or happiness we have left.

Now I know the truth, and I hate every miserable second of it.