For whatever reason, recently I’ve been thinking about the wound that has defined me the most. The majority of the stories I genuinely need to produce come back to that wound in one echo or another. Maybe it’s related to me having become forty-years-old. I would say middle-aged, but there’s no way in hell I’m living to eighty. Anyway, my fatal wound happened back when I was seven years old, when my mother asked me, as if you could ask a child to make such a decision, whether I wanted to move in with my older brother to free up my room so they could have another child.

My memory is abysmal, which I suspect is a blessing. Most of my forty years of living has been reduced to a bunch of photographs or sequences of frames that barely seem to cover anything. It’s like trying to reconstruct an epoch from the few fossils you come across. But I recall that until I was seven, I lived entangled to my subconscious. Like I was married to it. Daydreaming all day long. Making what my subconscious told me to create. Some adults that came across the stuff from those years were surprised. As in “a child that age doesn’t create stuff like this.” Unfortunately, it also included narratives that would make A Clockwork Orange blush; not for nothing I’ve always felt that I had darkness deep in me from birth. But the point is that I peaked back then, at about six or seven. When I truly communed with myself, and was whole.

From the moment I was put as an unwanted guest in my older brother’s room, until I turned eighteen and nearly beat him to a pulp, I was, a then-undiagnosed autistic kid with Pure O OCD, subjected to having the TV and radio on virtually always, including nights, because apparently enduring the silence was unbearable. I won’t get into my brother’s issues, but they’re plenty and complex in a way that anyone who has ever met him is surprised that such stuff even happens. I had been stripped of my safe space, of my solitude, of any corner purely for myself in which I could grow. I was like a plant forgotten under the stairs.

Looking back, the extreme to which I dissociated from my subconscious from then on is terrifying to think about. I genuinely came to believe that my natural instincts and impulses, everything that came from my brain without my conscious permission, was monstrous. I ceased knowing myself. I depersonalized. Throughout my teens I experienced something that only those who have endured the same thing will know I’m not exaggerating about: as I walked outside, I felt like I was commanding a puppet that I could barely coordinate, while I saw myself from the outside looking down, the edges of my vision constraining into a blurry tunnel. I slipped in and out of psychosis. The stuff I wrote back then was so incoherent that years later I threw it away because I feared that reading it again would contaminate me. And that included a novel about seven hundred pages long, which I rewrote again and again for years. I was sure I was going to die before I turned eighteen. I did pray to some eldritch god to come down and kill me. But I survived.

Shortly after my first job started, I saw how the rest of my life was going to be: enduring humiliation after humiliation, unbearable anxiety, under constant scrutiny as if every day was an exam I was sure to fail. Thankfully, I’ve never experienced a job like that again, but added to the despair I was already feeling, led me the closest I’ve ever been to erasing myself from this Earth. I’ve lost the memories of the aftermath, other than the fact that somehow I ended in the library, where my parents, who had been called by my job because I hadn’t shown up, found me. From then on, until my late twenties, with breaks of more unpaid internships than paid work, I basically lived as a hikikomori. In my late twenties, I thought that the only way I could make something out of my life was by selling my writings, of which I had done little since I was a child (somewhat counting the comics I drew in middle school). I wrote two books with a total of six novellas. They didn’t sell for shit, and mostly disturbed the people who read them. That discouraged me entirely, and I never wrote in Spanish again. However, writing those books helped me to slowly, laboriously, reconnect with my subconscious. Learn to recognize its desires and commands.

Early in my thirties, I started working in IT for a hospital. Terrible job that fought against my nature, and that I had to leave about seven to eight years later. But by then, now diagnosed and medicated for some other issues, I started producing fiction in English. This was by far my most prolific period. From seven to about twenty-seven years old, I identified with my conscious mind to a sickly degree, and believed that anything I couldn’t rationalize, any conclusion I didn’t reach through reason, was suspect, if not straight monstrous. But from my thirties onward, I no longer care, unless I’m forced to for the sake of money, about my conscious mind. It’s merely a tool to interpret and obey whatever my subconscious produces. The conscious mind also needs to be reigned in, because it acts as a lawyer, confusing and justifying what the subconscious has already decided, and often getting it completely wrong. I have learned that there are indeed monsters in me. I’ve also learned that I prefer the company of monsters.

That fatal wound in my past won’t heal. It broke my brain during development in ways that can never mend. I have to do the best I can with what I have. I don’t feel like interacting with humans, and those who have interacted with me for sustained periods of time (mostly at work), soon enough sense that there’s nobody “there.” In public, I’m a simulacrum of a human being. Left to my own devices, I’m some creature that doesn’t need definition nor to justify itself to anyone.

I also thought recently about something I witnessed when I was a teenager. I was returning home when I heard a commotion from four young people in their twenties who had parked in front of my parents’ apartment building. It was almost the same spot, if not the same, where my father parked the day I saw a UFO, when I looked up from the window only to find out it was right there. I wrote about it on this post, so I’m not going to repeat myself. Anyway, those young people in the car seemed freaked out, confused, out of it, but not in a “they’re drugged” way. They flagged down a passerby, and asked him if they were close to Barcelona. These weren’t foreigners; their plates were from Spain. The passerby, more disturbed than amused, scoffed and said, “Barcelona? You’re about seven hundred kilometers away! This is Irún, near the border with France.” The young people in the car, panicked, looked around frantically as if incapable of understanding how they had ended up there.

I haven’t made that up. I just don’t think about it often because it makes no sense. That day, I walked away, but I’ve imagined myself approaching them and asking, “What is the last thing you remember?” “Did you see any lights?” I imagine myself telling them that if anyone did this to them, they could have easily killed them but didn’t, so they should just try to relax and get on with their lives.

I don’t know what it means. That could be applied to the entirety of what I’ve lived through. Trying to understand myself is like spelunking with a dim light through passages that keep changing. And I’m still here because I just happen to be. I suspect that when I finally realize I’m breathing my last, a smile will be on my lips. Then, I will tend my hand inwards to the love of my life, who was there for me as a child when I didn’t have anyone else, and who waited patiently for years until I went down into that darkness to find her again.