đ§šđȘ The Version of Me That Made the Kill.
đ„ RSOâą Entry 005 - Internal Myth Cycle, Part I: What happens when the version of you that chose violence comes back to collect.
This was the first version I wrote.
Before I went through a mass edit.When she appears, she doesnât knock. She arrives like a verdict. The version of you that stopped surviving and started choosing violence. She didnât heal. She evolved. And now sheâs back to collect what you abandoned.
A version of you returns from the timeline where she bled on her own terms and demands to know why you didnât. If youâve ever felt like the understudy in your own life, this is the main character kicking down your dressing room door.
This isnât memoir. Itâs an internal myth. A psychological architecture disguised as event. A conversation between versions. The rhythm between them is the story.
Prompt: A version of you arrives from a timeline where she made every decision like a blade. She didnât survive. She calcified. You have one encounter. No do-over. Just aftermath.
She smelled like the air after a scream that had nowhere to land: sharp, electric, the scent of something that broke through and didnât apologise. Like ozone before lightning - not the innocent kind, but the kind that hums in your teeth and dares you to flinch.
You meet the version of yourself who did it right, or maybe just did it louder. The one who made all the right mistakes at the right volume. Who didnât apologise for being sharp at the edges. Theyâre better than you. They know it. And they donât pretend otherwise. They donât soften it for your sake.
This is not an origin story. This is a collision. A psychodrama disguised as a haunting. Itâs what happens when envy wears your face and patience runs out. Youâre not just watching someone spiral; youâre watching someone claw at a reality that was once theirs, before it calcified in someone elseâs spine.
If youâve ever stared at your reflection and felt like a rehearsal, an echo of a life that didnât stick the landing, this is for you.
PART I: The Arrival.
It started in a city park that smelled like rusted teeth and wet paper. I was sitting on a bench I didnât remember choosing, under a sky that flickered like a dying screen. It was October, but not the cosy kind. The air had that glitchy, voltage feel, like a wire was loose somewhere under the skin of the world.
Leaves whispered to themselves. The wind kept trying to say something and giving up. Somewhere, a bird sang the wrong melody and started over. The world felt delayed. Like a file buffering. Like something was arriving.
And then she was beside me.
Not walking up. Not entering the frame. Just there, as if she had always been. As if Iâd sat down next to her by accident in a timeline that didnât belong to me.
She looked like me if someone had scraped out the guilt and filled the cavity with precision. Her posture was architectural, as though sheâd been engineered, not raised. Her coat moved like ink in water. Her earrings glinted like tiny, polite weapons. Her smile wasnât felt; it was drafted. Printed. Just enough charm to seem human. Just enough menace to suggest it was optional.
I wanted to tear the calm out of her face with my bare hands. To taste the steel in her peace. To take that boot - the one I almost bought before I choked on self-loathing and closed the tab - and smash my ribs until something woke up.
Instead, I sat there, like a candle that had forgotten how to burn, while she studied me like a past life she no longer mourned.
PART II: The Cost.
âI wondered if youâd show,â she said.
No greeting. No warmth. Just that voice, cool and precise, like a scalpel dragged slowly across a confession. It didnât rise, didnât soften. It simply landed, as if it had been said a hundred times before, always with the same ending.
She looked me over like I was a glitch she remembered fixing.
âDidnât expect the shoes,â she added, flatly. Her tone wasnât mocking. It was clinical. As though she was noting a deviation in a lab sample. As though the trainers were proof of my undeleted shame.
I looked down. Rain-mottled canvas, one lace frayed, the other looped through desperation. They were the shoes of someone trying to pass for okay, and failing with detail.
Her boots were the ones Iâd left in an abandoned shopping cart at 2:13 a.m., on a night soaked with guilt and self-disgust. Theyâd looked too expensive, too decisive. Iâd backed away from them the same way Iâve backed away from every version of myself that might have made demands. She wore them as if theyâd always belonged to her. As if they had carried her through better choices and worse ones, both made with conviction.
âYouâre doing fine,â she said - a pause, as if choosing whether to lie. âWhich is just decay with a playlist.â
I laughed. Reflexively. Like a body flinching before pain. And immediately hated myself for needing her to think I was in on the joke. She didnât laugh. Didnât even twitch. Just blinked - like she was taking a photo. Of me. Falling apart. God, was I?
Then came the dissection.
âYou donât write like it hurts anymore,â she said. Not cruel. Just bored. âNow you write like you owe them clarity. Like youâre afraid of being opaque.â
I bristled. âIâm survivingâ, the words already brittle on my tongue.
She shrugged. The kind of shrug thatâs really a verdict.
âI didnât come here to witness survivalâ. Her eyes scanned me like I was already archived. âI came to confirm I made the right kill.â
She leaned closer, her coat whispering around her like a liquid shadow. I smelled her again, that post-storm scent laced with static and aftermath. And beneath it, something worse: the sour, stomach-curdling scent of truth that arrived uninvited.
The world around us was beginning to unravel. The leaves scuttled in circles. A child shrieked in a tone that couldnât decide if it was joy or terror. The light was coming in sideways. The same bird circled three times. Shadows detached from their sources and flickered, unsure of where to land. It felt like the park had been peeled away from time.
âWhatâs it like,â I asked, âyour life? In the other timeline. The one where you chose better. Or just bled louder.â
She smiled. Not warmly. Not cruelly. Just... surgically.
âI donât explain myself. I let the consequences introduce me.â
That should have been my cue to walk away. To throw some self-forgiving mantra into the air like glitter and exit dramatically. But I didnât move. I stayed rooted to the bench like a relic, because I wanted something from her. Not forgiveness. Not even understanding. I wanted proof that I hadnât been wrong to want more.
âWhat do you see when you look at me?â My voice didnât crack. It surrendered. âThe me sitting here. Not the idea of me. Just... meâ.
She tilted her head. I could see it then, the scar on her forehead. Tiny, faint, but unmistakable.
Mine.
Bike crash, age nine, a stupid race with scraped gravel and a swallowed scream.
Except on her face... it wasnât a memory. It was still healing. Pink and fresh and alive, like pain she had decided to keep open.
âYouâre still afraid of being disliked,â she said. âYou dress your wounds up as credentials. But pain isnât depth. Itâs just loud.â
I winced. Not because it was wrong. But because it was clean.
âAnd you?â I snapped. âYou think being ruthless makes you real?â
She didnât answer. Just turned toward the playground as though sheâd outgrown this reality decades ago.
âYou still believe youâre only worthy if youâre suffering,â she said. âYouâve built this little altar in your pathetic little mind where joy gets burned in exchange for legitimacy. Like if you ever felt whole, youâd lose your right to speak.â
I didnât mean to say it, but it tumbled out.
âI am fakeâ.
She nodded like a teacher hearing a correct answer too late to change the test.
Thatâs when the hate bloomed.
I hated her serenity, her knife-precise smile, her posture that looked copyrighted. I hated how she held my scar like it was a talisman and not a trauma. I wanted to unzip her. Not metaphorically. Literally. Peel her skin open and crawl inside and see if I could survive where she lived. I wanted her spine, or at least the name of the god who had given it to her.
âI didnât need to ask. But I did, like someone still hoping the poisonâs changed.â
âYou already are,â she said, flat.
âWhat did you steal from me?â
Her answer was a slow, blood-warm smile.
âNothing,â she said. âYou labeled your spine âtoo muchâ and left it at the door. Every yes you didnât mean was a donation. Every apology you made for existing was a signed surrender. I just picked up what you left rotting.â
She stood, and the bench groaned as if grateful to be rid of her.
PART III: The Exit.
She didnât look back at me right away. She looked at the fog-thin air ahead of her as though it was a door only she could see. The world seemed to lean towards her. Light shifted, wind steadied, even the leaves stopped their nervous scraping. Reality bent a little to make her exit clean.
âI came to see if you had anything left I wanted,â she said with a smug look on her face. And then so matter of fact, âYou donât.â
It wasnât cruel. It wasnât even triumphant. It was the way someone might note a fact, the way a butcher might point at a carcass and say already stripped. No malice, just what it is.
And then she started walking. Her boots made no sound, but the ground remembered. Fog curled at her ankles like a pet. She wasnât striding; she was being carried.
I wanted to follow. I wanted to tackle her, to claw at her calm until it shredded. I wanted to scream and beg and curse until she cracked open and dropped something, anything, I could steal. But I couldnât move. My body had gone devotional, locked in a posture of silent asking.
She turned once before she disappeared, sharp as a comma in the throat of a sentence. Her eyes found mine as though sheâd left them there on purpose.
âTry letting them misunderstand you,â she said. âItâs cleaner than bleeding out for their comprehension.â
And then she dissolved. Not vanished. Dissolved, into angles, into scent, into something the air swallowed whole.
The park returned to itself: birdsong limped back into rhythm, shadows reattached, the wind remembered its script. Only the bench and I remained, both of us a little warped.
I sat there long after she was gone. The smell of her still ghosted in the air, that post-lightning tang of a storm that refused to end. I kept the scar. I kept the boots, not literally, but in the part of me that hoards metaphors like weapons.
Which is worse.
Sometimes I still catch her reflection in mirrors, a half-beat behind mine, eyes steady, watching without blinking. Not judging. Not waiting. Just present, as if sheâs checking to see if Iâve found my sharpener yet.
And every time Iâm about to sand down a blade in my writing, every time I reach for the soft ending, I hear her. Not loud. Not kind. Just true.
âWrite like it cost you something. Or stay silent.â
âNo one needs another prophet afraid to bleed.â
âIf they understand you, you probably lied.â
Thatâs her legacy, the part she left behind on purpose: not advice, not warning, but a dare. A living dare breathing behind my teeth.
And maybe thatâs enough. Maybe she didnât take everything.
Maybe she left the one thing she couldnât use -
The hunger.
đ Read: âThe Cut That Didnât Healâ.
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