You already know the rest of the story, if it can even be called a story at all. We left the shop after about another hour of largely aimless wandering, and walked my grandfather back to his apartment. Samium left part-way to return to his lodgings and then attend a meeting with some city official, while the two of us continued on what should have been about a ten minute journey to the tram station. There was no poignant final conversation; my grandfather was in no state for that. The last things he said to me in his life were that there were too many new buildings in the area lately (there weren't), and that he wanted to buy some fresh coffee beans because the stuff he'd been drinking lately was awful. That was about 40 seconds before he got a concussion and died.

I could talk more about the moment it happened, and maybe I will later... When this is all over. But for now... I'll tell a different story. This one happened a long time ago, when I was a very young child.

I said before that what happened to my grandfather was the first time I really encountered death, but that was only true in an emotional sense, not in a strictly technical one. My mother... or rather the mother of the person I remember being... died in an accident when I was still an infant. I can't remember anything about her; I only saw her face in photographs and never even heard a recording of her voice. There's literally nothing I could say about her as a person other than that she had brown hair but otherwise looked almost nothing like me, since my family couldn't afford a pre-natal distinction treatment, and my foster family didn't bother with the cheaper, later-in-life ones.

My first memory pertaining to my mother comes from when I must have been about four or five years old. After some playground exchange about the subject, I asked my dad (about two years before he had a breakdown, got involved with a pseudo-revolutionary nationalist movement, and effectively abandoned me) why I didn't have a mother. He got upset, but ultimately said the predictable sort of things that anyone would say to a child in my situation.

He told me that I did have a mother, even if I couldn't remember her. He told me that she'd sadly been taken from us, but had loved me dearly. And he told me she would always be with me, and that I shouldn't be ashamed.

I consider myself an extremely sentimental person, but I'm also self-aware enough to understand that sentimentality is broadly a learned behavior rather than a natural one. Grief, the raw agony of loss, is natural. But sentimentality, the ritualized and often abstracted bittersweet longing for lost things, is like grief minced up in a factory and sold to you in a tin. It's the product of a million sad stories, songs, cultural acts of reverent remembrance; it's something we learn to feel in order to soften ourselves, an active suppression of the the numbing and forgetting that is our animal character.

So when I heard that as a kid, I wasn't as sentimental as I am now. And so was completely baffled as to what my dad even fucking meant.

Like, what the hell does it mean for someone who you don't even remember to 'always be with you'? It was so obvious to me, even then, that it was a comforting platitude of the emptiest, shallowest sort. Under normal circumstances, one can interpret that sort of phrase as meaning that you'll always have the memory of the person to bring you comfort and immerse you in tangible fantasy, but I didn't even have that.

Why do humans love one another? When you allow yourself to sound like an absolute creep, it's not as though the answer is complicated: We love people because they have utility to us, either explicitly or abstractly. Setting aside sexual desire, people fall in romantic love because they sense interpersonal compatibility for a long-term relationship of mutual material and psychological support, including a degree of emotional openness that is not normally socially acceptable. The same parts of the brain fire when you fall in love as when you find a new source of water in an inhospitable environment; it feels very good because you have acquired a scarce resource.

Close friendships are the same but with diminished commitment, while non-immediate family are the same with diminished levels of support. Parent-child relationships are the most complicated, with the character of the utility shifting dynamically over the course of decades, first wholly abstractly psychological for the parent and material for the child, then ultimately balancing or even swinging in the other direction. There's also an element of return on investment.

...okay, I did say that would make me sound like a creep, but it was maybe a little much.

My point is, human relationships are founded on the fulfillment of needs. Without that, the word 'relationship' has no meaning.

The fact was, my mother was dead. ...no, even the word 'dead' is a kind of illusion, an attempt at appealing to history to impart a greater sense of realness to a phantom of the mind. Rather, my mother did not exist. Other children's mothers gave them things because the flesh of their brains contained a will that loved them. If I'd dug up my mothers grave, the ashes which had once constituted her mind would do nothing but sit there. If I put them in my mouth, I would choke on them. All telling me she was 'with me' did was make me think about what I didn't have.

This isn't the story I wanted to tell, just a prelude to it. Because my dad had put that idea in my head, I wondered again and again over the course of the next few years how my life might have been better if I did have a mother, and channeled those feelings into reality in various ways. When I moved to the foster home and came to pretty much hate my dad, I started fantasizing a lot about their having my mother suddenly show up out of the blue one day to get me, with her death having been some big misunderstanding. When I got too old to believe that was remotely plausible, I instead had fantasies about having a mother more generally; about being adopted, and that missing part of my life being filled up. I'd think about what we'd do together, what words she would speak to me. How I'd get all the things I'd missed out on, how the world would be corrected.

But if you know anything about adoption, you probably already know that once you're past about age four, you're essentially past your 'expiration date'. Almost no one wants a child who isn't an impressionable infant, and the few who do are generally going to go for the cute overachievers. I was not a cute overachiever. And even if I had been a cute overachiever, having a parent still floating around who occasionally flirted with the idea of trying to be a father again was a death sentence.

So eventually, I had to accept it was never going to happen, and give up trying to attract the few prospective parents who occasionally came to have a look at us. I grieved, and did my best to suck it up. I took the bitterness that had taken root in my heart on the day I'd heard that vacuous platitude and used it to harden my heart. I submitted to the apathy of the cosmos and accepted injustice.

Of course, I was hardly unique in any of this - probably every kid around me was going through a similar emotional journey as they grew older. People talked about it in the way that, funnily enough, people generally talk about death. It is inevitable. No help is coming. Let it go.

But then, one day, something odd happened. Another child - I didn't know him well, just that he had a reputation of being 'the funny one' around the building and really liked collecting posters and pamphlets for live theatrical productions - had my original fantasy literally play out. Despite thinking his mom was dead, she just showed up. They had a tearful reunion, and a few weeks later, he was gone.

At the time, I felt sick. It was like a pillar had fallen out of the world.

Should I never have given up hope? And if not, what made my hope false, and his reasonable?

Once I started to think about it, I realized the world was contradictory. Everywhere, you found people telling others that things they wanted were foolish and impossible, and they needed to accept reality. And then you found stories where those very things had happened. 'Your condition means you'll never live past 40.' 'They'll never take you back; you need to move on.' 'You'll never find work as a musician, stop living in a fantasy.' 'Everyone in the field agrees it's scientifically impossible.' 'Don't buy a lottery ticket, it's a waste of luxury debt.' Again and again.

Kamrusepa was sort of an idiot, but sometimes she brought up insightful things, even if it was usually an accident. Why was living forever - or at least, an obscenely long time - not out of the question for us, but for the people who wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh, even a little life extension was such an absurd proposition it was worthy of a parable to warn people away? It was all in the context. The slippery, ever-shifting context. We expected to live to 500. But tomorrow that could change, and that expectation could become insane; morbidly pessimistic, or delusionally optimistic.

People need narratives, boundaries of conceivable reality, to function. But they're towers built on quicksand. The world's true form - its true­ form - is a wasteland of precarity, where your dearly-held wisdom can turn to self-destructive poison at a moment's notice. Nothing is certain. Not even death.

The old world was annihilated for an arbitrary reason. And it was reborn in an arbitrary way. So to it was for my own birth. Everything is profane.

So how are you supposed to live? How do you know whether or not a cause is doomed until it's spent you? When is it right to let things go, and if some things, why not everything?

Maybe I was just immature, and failed to accept the mathematics of circumstantial choice that defined being a human being. But everywhere I looked, the world was dissonant. I stood outside stores and watched other people buy things I desperately wanted, but couldn't afford. People surrounded by loved ones they had attained by default, while I hadn't. And I felt angry, but more then that, I felt confused. All of it felt unjust, but which was genuinely unjust, and which only felt that way because of my own delusional entitlement? What did 'entitlement' even mean?

I didn't understand. I didn't know what battles to fight. I couldn't tell which kinds of pain I should accept, and which were my enemy.

...I'm sorry. I don't mean to rant. I just don't know how to put it into words.

My 'motive'.

I think it was in despair at that confusion that, for the few years between then and when my grandfather died, I started to believe in fate. That life, or at least my life, had to operate on some kind of storybook logic. That there was inherent meaning in any struggle I took up. That there would be a happy ending.

There is no force that can exist in the human heart more terrifying than genuine belief.

Even now I don't know all the specifics, but the rough details are certain. My grandfather was utterly unwilling to accept the person he loved having died. It drove him to dedicate his entire life to a field in which he had little natural talent, to accomplish feats of arcane science that few could imagine... And to commit murder, and exploit some of the people who trusted him the most.

Still, the world bent. He must have believed, too.

I've told this story - not this part in particular, this entire narrative of my past - selfishly, in a way where I know I'll have come across more sympathetically than I deserve. Sometimes, like when I spoke about when I first met Cheng Gue, it's bordered on outright deceit. I've done this because, even though I espouse guilt and self-loathing, the truth is that part of me still wants to believe that I'm a good person.

But that's enough.

years, 93 days, and 17 hours prior to the present, under no illusions about the details of what was to happen, I committed murder.

And... This has been my confession.

...

It's enough for me say that. ...isn't it?