Here is your new life.

You prepared for it, at least. And you don’t know who you are, but you know who you are, and it’s a little miracle that you did prepare for it at all. Preparation has never been much of a strength for you.

These little boxes with things in them that at some point you decided you would need, or in some cases, perhaps only that you had loved in some way that you cannot now recall. A shockingly substantial fistful of cash; a craving for nicotine; a very well-loved pair of shoes.

None of your shoes have shoelaces. The thought of tying your shoes is strangely unsettling. No sense dwelling on why it might be: this, like everything else that was not in these few boxes, is lost to you now, and maybe that’s a relief.

Did you leave in a bottle of perfume that walks a careful line between masculine and feminine because you liked to wear it? Or did you leave it in because you hoped that the smell of it might bring some face to your memory that is a blank now?

You remember the name of the woman who helped you: Joy. You remember the name of the royal force that came into your life at the mere feeling of your pleading: Cosmos. You remember a vague sense of pain that was probably not so much in your body as in grieving for your grief, and you remember that you chose to do these things, but also that you had to do these things, because the alternative was something you were either too brave or too cowardly to face.

It was not a complete victory, of course. The main goal has gone unanswered. So much has gone blurry and wisped away with a cold sensation in your chest, but not the one thing that you had hoped to leave behind you. A guilty conscience has a staying power that persists, apparently, beyond faces and names and the associations of the senses.

You still know what you did all those many years ago. And what’s worse: you know why you did it, and that the reason can bring you nothing but shame. There were a lot of things giving chase ever since, which is a fact that you know vaguely and incompletely. But this thing: this was the cat that’s been holding you between its claws for a decade, toying with you in that horrible way that cats do: forever letting you believe that you’ve escaped only to be dragged back for another round until the day that you decide you can no longer run and succumb to the inevitable.

And now you see that it was moronic to think that you’d finally escaped. The cat’s got its teeth in you now.

They pretend like they can scrub the grime off your soul, and you believed them. They probably believed themselves. Honor, virtue. Bullshit that you’re supposed to be representing now, laughably unsuited to the responsibility.

Good thing you’ve always been so fond of lying your way into places you shouldn’t be.