A Message in a Bottle

[I-0]

A dusty letter, stuffed into a bottle, and set adrift in the ocean.

Nothing more, nothing less.

It's addressed to nobody, and carries no signature.

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It's been a very long time coming, but I think I'm ready to meet you. I'm not confident how my mother made contact with you - I only know that once she had, you gave her the path to that wasteland through her dreams. I've had plenty of visions, plenty of hallucinations. I've heard your laugh, I've seen your eyes, I've seen your ⬛⬛⬛. For a while, I thought that you were showing me them as a sign that you were proud of me, proud of whatever it was I was doing.

I hated it. I hated any indication that my path resembled yours, that I was anything like you. Whenever I wanted to push people away from me, whenever I wanted to be alone to feed the crawling at the edges of my mind, I imitated what little I knew of you.

I called people rats. I treated them like disposable little trinkets I could mine fun out of, and then throw away when they got boring. It was all just... theater.

An imitation of someone I'd only heard of through a single, secondhand story, in which you presented yourself however you wanted. How meaningless is that? It certainly isn't valid evidence. It doesn't tell me much about what kind of person you are - only what kind of person you wanted her to see you as.

And maybe, just maybe, you were imitating someone else you'd known to look cool and scary, just like I was...?

Or, maybe, it was exactly accurate - and you're every bit the monster I imagined when I was a kid.



I don't expect this bottle to reach you. Not physically, anyway. But if my suspicions are correct, it won't have to.
You read it as I wrote it.

I have your eyes, don't I?