Letters to Earth

[TRIGGER WARNINGS: Physical violence, gore, or abuse, suicide or self harm]

My father used to write letters. He said they were “to Earth”, though at the time the concept was as abstract to me as death. A thing I was only beginning to learn about. His letters and death were somehow intertwined, yet I never understood their contents, even when he would murmur them under his breath. He never allowed me to read them, not even after I had mastered the alphabet perfectly. Nor to listen in. So I don’t know what he wrote. I’m sorry. I feel like I should.

Should I, Isaac? But there was nothing I could have done.

I watched him trace long, peculiar letters with a strange pen. Long and wavering, because his hand moved in sweeping motions and rarely left the page. He paid no attention to me when we both sat in silence, so I could look at him freely. These memories are vivid. Strangely so, because when I try to reach further back, I encounter resistance. As if my father truly placed some kind of barrier there. I don’t know. In any case, these are the only memories that have colour, sound, and even texture. I remember touching the soft carpet and smelling wood. A fireplace, perhaps. Yes, my father always lit a spectacular fire, but he forbade me from approaching it closer than a meter.

I’m not stupid, Isaac. At least not anymore. Now I know such a fire is dangerous. It was kind of him to protect me. Or perhaps he merely ensured that I would live. The fire I had known before was my dead friend. Entirely harmless. It shimmered red, yet it was cold like the tall grasses here, or the ferns in your house. They swayed endlessly, and I ran between the flames, pretending they were trying to catch me. I was playing what you called tag. A strange word, but that’s what you named it when we chased one another, shouting “tag”. I had only just seen “people”, the ones my father spoke of, with my own eyes, and they already said we would play.

Funny.

“Play” means pleasure. It means something that makes me tremble with delight. And something for which I receive a reward. My father rewarded me for playing.

I’ve noticed that on Earth, people don’t seem to do that. They don’t know the concept. It’s a shame. No one knows how to play.

Do you know why people don’t understand my kind of play, Isaac?

In hell, I used to stack stones. One atop another. Flat ones, like marble. My father said they were shoulder blades and skulls. He would stroke my head. That was nice. I liked the way his fingers touched my hair, gently massaging my scalp. The sensation was brief, yet extraordinary. I hope you have felt it too, at least once.

I tried it here. But the stones proved brittle, and I felt nothing. So I wanted to arrange the souls I had gathered so far, but once again, I learned that on Earth, many things are impossible. I couldn’t grasp the souls. As if they had been deprived of them from the very beginning. Strange.

Fortunately, I could do it with bodies. Yes, I learned that only they’re material here. And heavy. Very heavy. So I rearranged three bodies (I lost the others). Like this: first, I lay down the largest, spreading its limbs wide. Then I fitted the second onto it, so they overlapped, and their lines merged into one. Unity. I was fascinated by how they yielded beneath my fingers. So limp. So submissive.

Obedient.

I tried to make them lie upon one another as perfectly as possible. The last one, the smallest, I lifted by the legs and head, carefully placing it on top. It wasn’t easy, they slipped. I was tempted to throw it, because its teeth rattled so amusingly and its bones snapped like twigs. But I restrained myself. I wanted them to be perfect. I wanted to honour them. And when I finally achieved perfection, I sat before them and admired the majesty of human bodies joined in symbiosis.

They were stiff and pale. Rough, yet somehow smooth like polished diamonds. Human bodies are beautiful. There is no word to describe “beauty.” But you must believe me. Is this what death looks like? Is death beautiful?

Are humans diamonds that are meant to be polished?

Even so, people remain a mystery to me. What kind of being are you, Isaac? My father never explained it clearly enough, so I don’t understand. I’m not certain of my own species or origin either. I once heard my father call me a “half-demonic entity.” A “half-demon.”

I think I know what demons are. You know, don’t you? They are everywhere on Earth. In your films, games, and books. People like to be afraid. And even more, they love to stuff “evil” wherever they can. I still don’t feel comfortable with that word. I remember when you first said it to me. “Evil.” It pierced me almost as sharply as the sound you made. And no matter how long I think about it, I can’t grasp its meaning. It’s an abstraction. Humans deal in abstractions.

My father is a demon. And demons in hell are nothing like the ones humans imagine. They remind me of souls trapped in bodies that aren’t their own. Something self-created from nothing. Something that surpasses your world, Isaac. Mine as well, though I don’t truly possess one. I feel as though I belong to no reality in which I exist. I don’t even know how many there are. Am I real, or merely a creation of my own imagination?

I have thought about these things for a long time, and I can’t capture them fully in the words I now inscribe. But there is one more. You said that humans reproduce. That more are created this way, so your species may endure. I still don’t understand how you do it, so please describe it in your reply.

Where did I come from? I am a half-demon. Half. What does that mean? From what parts was I made? If my father is a demon, why am I only half of him? Where is the other half that created me? What kind of being was it, if I’m not pure?

This has troubled me ever since I heard the word “mother”.

Mother. Mother and father.

That means I must have a mother. Who is my mother, Isaac? My father will never tell me. I asked once, but his eyes filled with anger. They glowed crimson, then sank back into black.

I was punished. Punishment is the opposite of play. Play is touch. Touch is pleasant. That day, he stopped stroking me. He didn’t look at me, not the way he used to. Does that mean a mother is something evil?

So I returned to where I began.

What is evil?

I remember you said I was chaotic. One of the few words I understood. I learned about chaos from the books my father gave me. In mathematics, it’s the instability of solutions due to initial conditions. In biology, a genus of amoebae within the supergroup Amoebozoa. But in Greek mythology, it’s the personification of the primordial void.

The state before the universe was ordered.

And perhaps you were right.

Perhaps I am chaos.

I’m sorry that humans can’t comprehend play. Your friends aren’t dead. They’re part of me now. They fill me. They shaped me. They became diamonds in a sea of filth.

You wanted me to explain.

Xoxo

(I don’t know what that means, but your girlfriend wrote it that way)

I placed the final period and closed the parentheses, adding a remark. The last letters smudged under my finger. Sweat trickled down my hands. I had spent too long searching for the right words. I gripped the pen so tightly it nearly snapped, and when I tried to let go, my fingers trembled, as though frozen in place. Numb. Just like my legs, hanging stiffly over the void between the bridge and the river.

A stream roared inside my head. Leaves, driven by the wind, rustled and whispered a cacophony of sound before drowning in the water below.

I watched my feet begin to move with the rhythm of the wind. My torso swayed with them, and soon I surrendered to the motion. My legs shifted back and forth, making faint clicking sounds in my knees. I could lose myself in my own broken breathing, in the creaking of the boards. I could watch the water grow darker and darker. I could fill my ears with that relative silence, prolonging the moment in which I held the paper. I threw the pen like a stone. It splashed, struck the rocks, and vanished beneath the black surface, so I would add nothing more. And cross nothing out.

For a moment, I pretended I had forgotten why I was here. And for a while, it worked as I wrote word after word, sentence after sentence, though it was difficult to translate my thoughts into them. I resisted rereading the letter. I wanted it to remain honest. Perhaps flawed, inconsistent, and illogical, but at least containing what I lacked.

Truth. Emotion. Feelings I would never be able to recreate. I accepted that I couldn’t tell Isaac everything. What would be the point? He wouldn’t understand. He couldn’t help me. He’s human. Nothing more.

The paper was dampened with sweat. Staring into the depths of the navy sky, waiting for stars, made no sense. It didn’t stop time. Just like closing my eyes didn’t make me invisible to others. Earth could be endlessly intriguing, especially when I admitted, with irritation, that its reality couldn’t be bent to my will. Its surface didn’t yield beneath my pressure, it remained untouchable, unshapable. That’s why my father said human matters are complicated. Their world follows its own laws, and demons have no power to break its barriers.

Everything I had done carried consequences across every dimension of time. Past, present, and future felt like three separate worlds, interwoven by a bond I could not understand. I lost myself within them, wandering like in the fog that sometimes hung too low over hell. But there, at least, I always knew where to go. I followed instinct.

Here, I was condemned to wander endlessly.

I forgot to write that to Isaac. And I didn’t know if I would ever have the chance to tell him. Because when we stand face to face again…

I sighed, crumpling the corners of the paper. The cold air froze my hands, turned my lips blue. I wrapped my arms around myself, carefully brushing my ribs. It wasn’t the first time I caught myself imitating human behaviour, trying to comfort myself and replicate someone else’s touch on my own body. To convince myself that if the cold numbed me, it wouldn’t hurt as much this time.

I curled in, lowered my head, and went still. My legs stopped swinging. My nose stopped drawing in the air. My hands trembled before I pulled them away and placed one against my hair. I pressed, seeking that faint warmth on my scalp. It was pleasant. Similar to being stroked. Only now, I was stroking myself. I moved my fingers through each strand, up and down, closing my eyes as I tried to recall my father’s face.

Instead, Isaac appeared.

His pale face was watching me calmly. He smelled sweet, sweeter than usual, and I used to love sitting close to him because of it. To admire how strong and resilient a human body can be. How his mind worked at full capacity, never ceasing to analyse. So efficient, despite being trapped within a cage of fragile bones. His eyes always looked at me the same way. Sidelong, from above, when he thought I wasn’t watching.

I wanted him to look. So I let him, humbly, as long as he wished. Perhaps I even hoped he would rest his hand upon me. Touch me. But in the end, he always recoiled in disgust, and nothing remained in his gaze but coldness.

Coldness and hatred.

A hatred I couldn’t comprehend.

Those pupils, warm black, ringed with deep amber, became the embodiment of my misery. My mistakes. My attempts, which always, always ended in failure.

The wind howled in my ears, tugging at the letter, threatening to carry it away. I folded it in half, smoothing the edge with my nail. I didn’t know how to make it reach Isaac, nor what my father had done with his finished letters. So I slipped it between the planks, where it caught on splinters. I assumed that sooner or later, he would pass this way.

In truth, it didn’t matter whether he read it. I knew it would change nothing. But I needed to release at least a fraction of what was consuming me from within. I wanted something meaningless to suddenly have meaning. Or perhaps I wanted him to stop hating me.

I shook my head, and amused by yet another involuntary human reflex, I pulled a knife from my pocket.

The unwashed blade still smelled faintly of recently cut vegetables, and traces of my blood lingered in the grooves of the handle. I had taken it from Casey’s house. Sweet Casey. An angel whose very thought turned my stomach and left a sickly taste on my tongue.

Casey had a mother. She called her Mum.

Her mother liked using that knife to slice watermelons. It was sharp, effortless, and precise. Casey used it for avocados, for chopping lettuce.

For me, it first served to carve lines into bodies. Twisting serpents and ribbons across chests and backs. I even tried to carve pentagrams, fascinated by human visions of demonic symbols. But nothing pleased me as much as sinking the blade into my own flesh.

There is a difference between injury and the final blow. And even if I didn’t contain a single element of a true human on Earth, my body had become human. It obeyed human laws. It followed the nature of this world. I didn’t like to admit it, but my mind had changed as well. That’s why the blade stopped at my bare stomach. Why did my hand refuse to push further?

I didn’t want to die. If I said it aloud, I would laugh until dawn.

Of course, I didn’t want to leave, to feel my time end and surrender to decay. Like any living being, I wanted to survive. Self-destruction was unnatural. No human thought or act could change that.

For me, however, it was only temporary. This death, like the ones before and the ones yet to come, was merely a gateway. A passage to somewhere else.

I glanced at the letter, fluttering in the wind. I shouldn’t have. I moved closer to the edge. The boards bent under uneven weight. I gripped the knife tighter and pressed until pain forced my teeth to clench. I wanted to pull back. And then I drove the blade through myself, twisting it viciously inside, so I would never again feel that controlling fear.

I fell.

My head struck the rocks. My face plunged into the muddy river. I felt paralysis seize my body, my eyes closing. All that remained was to wait until death claimed the old shell, and life returned a new one, carrying me somewhere better.