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Sometimes I think. There’s lots of types of thinking. One’s called subconscious thinking and it’s the thought process or the train of thought that you subconsciously do and you can’t stop and there’s another one called triggered thinking where you think because your thought process is triggered because something happened and another one is called deliberate thinking where you actually trigger yourself to think to maybe solve a math problem or how you can get over the fence and then another one is deliberate-subconscious where you are aware that you are thinking but you can’t stop it. But I never went to school. And I never studied. So I don’t know for sure.

I never went to school and I think that is why I struggle to read and write. Sometimes I can’t write because I don’t know what to do and sometimes I can’t write because I’m too anxious to write and sometimes I can’t write because I think Chen would punish me for doing so even though he never punished me for writing anything.

I can write some words and I can write all letters and I can write all numbers but sometimes they’re upside-down or they’re the wrong way or they’re just long altogether and what was meant to be an ‘e’ ends up like a ‘q’ or a lot of wavy lines. And if I don’t get it right I get frustrated and I scream and I rip the paper in half and I hit myself.

I think they’ve called it ‘self-harm’. I attended lots of therapy and counselling sessions when I was thirteen years six months two days old when they first sent me to the Institute and self-harm is when you hurt yourself and it can by physical or psychological and they said that hitting and biting myself is an act of self-harm. And they say that if you think too much or you think all the time and you think to the point that it frustrates you is self-harm.

That’s lots of self-harm. Would Chanyeol be able to count it up?

Lots of people self-harm. Not in the way they think. They can stress things too much or clean something ninety times or not eat or run back and forth fifty times but it’s not for the sake of sports or they make themselves bleed. Everyone hurts themselves once in a while and it’s never a good thing and we’re all bunched up like tangled ropes in the inside but we’re all human and that’s the biggest mistake you can ever make in your life, that is—to be a human.

Chanyeol told me he was once a little bit like me. He didn’t like himself. But instead of hitting himself or trying to cut off his tongue like I did, he cut his arms open and sometimes I see the scars on his arms and it’s ugly and it’s not nice but that’s what he did, and he survived.

And it sounds weird but I’m assured by this because it’s a human thing to do. Chanyeol is human. All humans do stupid things and that’s why we call ourselves humans, because we are stupid. But there are smart humans. Smart humans aren’t stupid.

And that’s why we call them psychopaths because they’re smart humans. They’re creatures who call themselves human. They know what to do. They know what to think.

I’m scared of both. Because I don’t know who I am.

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I’m not very good at reading.

I can recognise my own name and numbers and my own writing and I know what they mean but if you show me something to read my mind goes blank and I don’t know how to read it.

Jongdae coughs and coughs and he carries this small cylinder with lots of white things that look like pebbles and whenever he starts coughing he swallows those pebbles. I don’t think they’re pebbles and I think they’re pills. But I can’t read what it says on the container and I won’t know if it’s antidepressants or white pebbles or clumps of wool or cyanide or fish pellets or pills. And I don’t want to ask because asking questions require speaking and I don’t like speaking because Chen might come and hit me.

Sometimes if Jongdae is strong enough he can push Chen far back into his mind and he can stay with me for a few hours before he leaves and Chen comes back. Jongdae tells me stuff about Chanyeol and how Chanyeol is doing because he kept contact with Chanyeol’s hospital or sometimes he tells me stories or sometimes he’d just cough and cough and cough and blood would come out of his mouth and I wonder if he’s sick or he’s playing a very cruel joke on me.

Everything is very confusing sometimes. I don’t know a lot of things and sometimes I struggle to remember who Chanyeol is or who am I or where I am and sometimes I can’t tell the difference b