Damn it, this is so suffocating...
My lungs are going to explode from just one goddamn breath.
Water crushes my chest from every side, heavy as sin, not giving me an inch to move.
The blinding pain radiating through my miserable carcass from the baseball bat and lead pipe massage I just got is making this panic pure torture.
My limbs are thrashing like a dying roach.
I don't know if it's because I never bothered to learn to swim, or if it's just that pathetic, primal instinct that I'm not ready to buy it yet.
No!
I'm not croaking here.
But hell, despite that grand declaration, the icy water forces its way down my throat anyway.
My chest is burning like a furnace.
The world's glitching, and even the last remnants of Photons dancing on the surface are drifting further and further away.
Used to be, I would've welcomed death as an exit.
I was just breathing space, a pathetic remnant of a trash human.
Used and degraded, nothing more than a toy to satisfy some bastard's massive ego.
For years I dragged myself through life like a rotting corpse.
My hands weren't clean either; I'd offed a guy. The dried blood on my skin was a constant reminder that my whole life was just a slow-motion execution—or maybe I was just too much of a coward to finish the job myself.
Then, the ghost of those eyes shattered the blackness in my head.
Eyes as blue as a clear winter sky just when the snow starts melting into slush.
Eyes that always looked at me with some delusional sense of hope, especially that day we were faking my email transcripts, thinking we could actually beat the odds.
"A scholarship."
Her ecstatic voice floats through my head, piercing the freezing river water deafening me."
Japan. Research assistant. We get paid."
Fragments of that fantasy escape plan crash against my brain, syncing up with the agonizing pressure in my chest.
A literal ticket out of this godforsaken country, a way to flee the rotting corpse of my past.
I remember her smile that day.
The warm, soft curve of her lips when she assured me this was it.
Those blue eyes were the solitary variable capable of softening the harsh, absolute constants of my wretched life.
When I was with her, this disgusted life was slowly crawling toward a purpose.
But reality is a merciless bitch.
The demon came back.
That nightmare that broke me before returned to strip everything away.
That one-sided beatdown shattered my ribs, pulverized our calculated future, and ended with me dumped like garbage, dying in this freezing river.
"I know you can do it."
Her voice sounds broken in my head, muffled and distorted by the water clogging my ears. But her smile remains crystal clear, and it fixes everything.
The memory of her touch hits me like a shield, anchoring my crumbling consciousness.
"Let's get married, and I won't ever let you be lonely again."
That promise digs deeper than the water filling my lungs.
It hardens my resolve to claw and kick at this heavy fluid, trying to force my broken body toward the surface.
Yet, every time I force my hands to reach for that light, a vicious spike of agony fries my goddamn sanity.
There is a massive puncture wound clean through my shoulder blade. That filthy knife from the fight tore my back muscles apart, and now the icy river seeps directly into the raw meat, incinerating my nerve endings until I'm on the verge of blacking out.
I continue to struggle against the blinding pain, no longer knowing if I'm ascending or just sinking deeper into the abyss.
Then, something appears in front of me
…Ah
Her book. The thing she always forced me to carry.
It's blurred, but I know it. That old, tattered cover is etched into my mind.
Strange... the book is open amidst the currents swirling around me, neither floating nor sinking. It hovers there with an orderly stillness, defying the Archimedes' Principle I learned back in middle school.
Weird...
The book is open right in the middle of the currents.
It's not floating, and it's not sinking.
It drifts with some methodical precision, utterly laughing in the face of that Archimedes' Principle I learned back in middle school.
Honestly, I don't have time for this academic shit—the tendons in my back are screaming with every move—but that stupid book is demanding my full attention even in this fatal crisis.
The first page flips open.
I distinctly remember it being completely blank, no matter how many times she made me haul it everywhere.
Damn it!
Now is not the time to be distracted.
My body cannot stop moving.
I have to endure the agony in my shoulder and reach for that light—the bright surface containing pure oxygen, free from the hydrogen atoms binding it.
Suddenly, letters materialize, weaving themselves into a paragraph across the page.
I know it, because the book is now filling my whole field of vision.
I don't recognize the script, yet I instinctively know when the text abruptly halts before the paragraph can finish. The characters tremble, then vanish.
The page returns to a stark blank.
Not even a second passes before another line appears. It's too short to be called a paragraph, written with a frantic, desperate urgency. But the result is the same—incomplete, then erased.
It happens over and over again, synchronizing with the steady decay of my consciousness and movements.
My body feels weightless, numb, yet I can feel it spasming weakly.
The bubbles created by my struggle have stopped rising.
The light at the surface drifts further out of reach.
But before the darkness swallows me whole, a single line manifests in the book.
It vibrates violently, as if fighting with everything it has to anchor its existence and avoid being wiped from the page.
The book slowly snaps shut.
As the blackness encroaches upon my vision, a faint memory surfaces from the depths of my fading mind.
"Alta… you might end up alone, but I will never let you be lonely… I promise."
The whisper of the girl lying beneath me, completely bare in my filthy, suffocatingly cramped room.
Back then, I knew.
The societal norms of this shit-hole country branded our actions as taboo, a violation of morality.
Yet, I let myself drown in her warmth.
It was my salvation.
I was working toward marriage, of course.
But…
If I die right here, society will brand her a filthy whore who slept with a murdering criminal.
I refuse to let that happen.
What if she's pregnant?
What if no one else will marry her because she's no longer a virgin?
What if the probability of her future is utterly ruined because I am no longer there to observe it?
I can't leave her alone.
I beg of you, God—or whoever, whatever entity Stephen Hawking disbelieved in.
The concept of Omnipresence, the Particles, the Atoms…
I don't care anymore.
If Hawking was right, and information is never truly lost, then let the sum of my information—every synapse of my memory, every heartbeat dedicated to that girl—continue to exist. I refuse to become entropy.
I refuse to dissolve into mere carbon at the bottom of this river.
If consciousness is nothing but a sequence of quantum data, then do not let this data be deleted.
Displace me.
Hurl me to any coordinates, into any reality.
As long as I can keep my promise, as long as I can be there for her—it doesn't matter what kind of reality awaits.
I just need this existence to endure. I need one more chance to ensure she doesn't face the stigma of this rotten world alone. If I must surrender my life's wave function to fate… then—
Collapse me into any reality. Just don't let me end here.