To Feel Again

My name is Kai, and this is the story of how I learned to cry again. I guess that doesn't make much sense, does it? Who would want to feel that way? But that's exactly the phrase they overlook, at least it's a feeling. People seem to think that the only thing we're capable of doing when we're sad is crying. But that's not true, there's a breaking point when things keep piling up, one after the next. Life gets so bad that you just shut it out: You turn it off.

People like that, people like me, are the most dangerous.

I'm not a sociopath, those people have never felt anything. They don't know what's been taken from them, they don't know what it feels like to love something and then lose it. People who turn their emotions off are at a completely different level of out of control. We know what it feels like to have our hearts ripped to shreds from the seams and that sometimes the only way forward is to leave that heart behind.

I don't feel remorse.
I don't feel that need to be close to others.
I am cold and calculating.

The only thing I feel when crossing names off that list is the satisfying recoil of the gun in my hand and the vicious joy of another job well done.

I certainly don't get butterflies at the sight of cute girls with legs for days.

"She's just a misguided young girl. What harm could she do?" they used to whisper. How wrong they were to question how dangerous someone without a heart can be. Somehow, between then and now I have become what haunts their dreams at night. Any person in their right mind knows to fear the woman with unnaturally white hair and mismatched eyes.

And I couldn't bring myself to care less about it.

That is until my newest assignment drags a certain puppy-eyed, lavender-haired idiot into my crosshairs, and I find my finger hesitating on the trigger and a nauseating flutter in my stomach for the first time in years. I'm so thrown off by the whole thing I've decided the payday can wait.