I Have No Regrets

Human interaction can be boiled down to a number of things.  We have sex, we long for power, we strive to succeed, we strive to reproduce, we try to understand ourselves, we try to understand everything around us and fail miserably at understanding a fraction of it, and finally we prepare ourselves for death.  Those are some common aspects of what we might consider to be the “human experience”, we just so happen to complicate them all.  So why do I feel regret after killing someone?  This isn’t the first person I happened to kill.  Maybe it’s because they were someone I could consider a friend, a lover perhaps.  I know that they loved me, but I couldn’t tell them that I felt the same way.  Or maybe, it’s because they remind me of the one person I truly cared about.  It’s a shame she passed away, especially when I needed her guidance and her compassion the most.  I used to wonder what it would feel like to die, to finally cease existing, to truly feel dead.  I might experience that today, but not before I finish my trip. 

It doesn’t seem to be far from here.  This is the place on the postcard, after all.  It’s the lucky postcard I’ve kept with me ever since I received it at the age of ten.  It was the same card that I received every year from Nana.  The reason I kept every one of them is because they were a great way for me to remember her by.  Every summer, I would go and visit her and, for what felt like mere moments at times, I felt safe.  That was until she finally passed away.  I mourned her loss for weeks.  While I was with her, I truly felt safety, being away from my family.  I couldn’t say the same for how I felt at home with mom and Marco.  My father left me when I wasn’t old enough to recognize, let alone remember him.  The imprint his absence left on my childhood and on me as a whole was tantamount to the amount of care I have for him, I needed him then, but now I don’t want him now.  And after what Marco did to me, how could you really blame me? 

I mean, really.  How could someone blame me for what I did to that fat bastard?  He deserved every bit of sh*t thrown his way and then some.  I wish I had stayed behind to piss on his grave.  It’s a shame I still gave enough of a damn not to get caught by the police to leave his rotting corpse where they placed it in the ground.  After what he did to me and to my mother, I could never look at him in the face, let alone forgive him for what he did to me, to us.  My mother would always take his rage.  She was his punching bag in a world full of frustration and temptation.  Anything that Marco found to be infuriating, he would take it out on her.  It didn’t matter if the simple stuff in life was going good.  He would always look for something to be upset over.  And when he reached his boiling point, he made his intentions clear by the marks he made on my mother’s back and on my face.  She always tried to protect me, sending me off to my room to await my poor mother hobbling to my room after another beating to try and comfort me.  The amount of times our tears covered our faces and soiled our clothes and the blankets of my bed are too many to count.  But to someone like Marco, that wasn’t what really got his rocks off. 

One night, Marco decided to head to my room rather than to my mom’s bedroom.  He tried to talk me up.  “Hey, Ivan.  Mind if I have a seat on your bed?”  I didn’t know what he was trying to do until he placed his arm on my thigh and flipped me over before I could say anything.  As vicious and violent as he was, it was his more “affectionate” and “passionate” side I feared the most.  I never thought he would do something like that to me, let alone after how much he would hit me and my mother.  But I suppose people’s deviancy trumps any sense of hatred they have, at least for a few moments.  It wouldn’t be until I was seventeen that my mother would find out, but when she did, it filled her with a rage unlike anything I had ever seen before.  I just wish I could have done more in the moment from Marco’s retaliation. 

She was furious in her confrontation.  “Why would you do that to Ivan?  How could you?  You monster!” She threw a glass vase at his head, narrowly missing him.  She found herself bowled over by him in an instant with his hands around her throat.  I wish I had reacted sooner, but something in my mind held me back, hesitant for just long enough of a moment for Marco’s hands to seal my mother’s life between them.  However, the second I saw my mother’s body begin to give beneath his grip, something in me snapped.  I happened to break through the fear, the hesitation, and ran for the counter to grab a knife.  He barely even noticed me, his rage and focus solely being on my dying mother.  He didn’t even notice I was there until I plunged the blade in the back of his head, skewering his fat head beneath a thick carving knife.  Tomorrow was Thanksgiving, days before my 18^th birthday, and my mother had all of the supplies for cooking out and about.  The blade plunged through the front of Marco’s neck, nearly decapitating him.  He choked on the steel as I drove it further and further through his body.  My mother’s eyes had already shut.  She was gone by the time I had acted.  There was nothing at that point I could do to save her, despite my attempts to resuscitate her after throwing Marco’s body off of her.  Tried as I might, there was no saving her.  Deep bruises had formed around her throat and there was no way I was going to bring her back.  I wish I had felt some kind of sadness for losing my mother, but all I could think of when I looked over at Marco’s body was the rush I got after seeing his dead, nearly decapitated body next to me.  It gave me a rush, almost the same kind of rush I got when I saw Nana every summer I went out to visit her.  As much as I wanted to stay, I knew I had to leave.  Marco had it in with the police in my town and I knew nobody around me would believe that I tried to save my mother from that bastard.  So, I decided to head out.  I went out back, dug a quick grave, and buried both mom and Marco in it together.  I took the car keys, Marco’s handgun, and whatever cards and cash I could find and decided I was going to head out west to California to find where Nana kept getting those postcards from. 

One of the first things I did after leaving my town was head to a local supermarket and buy a burner smartphone so I could communicate and do internet searches.  There was something in me after that night that just drove me to want to head out there.  Maybe it was killing Marco that drove me out there.  Maybe it was my way of escaping my past.  Either way, it was enough to drive me to head out there.  I kept making pit stops and couldn’t seem to keep gas in the tank.  I had just gotten my license but knew I had to be careful and lay low, less I get caught by the police and get arrested.  I passed through a few towns in Minnesota when I came across a girl in what looked like some dark clothing.  She had a hitchhiker’s thumb out, signaling that she needed a ride.  I pulled over and offered her a ride.  She gladly accepted the ride with me.  I tried to make small talk with her to find out who she was and happened to get a name and a story out of her before I had to pull over again.  “Do you mind if I ask what your name is?”

She nodded and told me her name.  “My name is Dessa.  I can tell you’re on the run.”

I tried to play it off.  “What gave you that idea?”

“Oh, the clothes, the burner phone on the dashboard, and the look in your eyes that says you’re trouble.”

I tried to hide a frown from her and explain my situation.  “Yeah, well, I guess we both have a reason we’re out here.”

She nodded.  “You’re right about that.  I’m not worried about you, though.  I’m worried about running into my boyfriend.”

I looked at her confused.  “Why are you worried about running into him?”

She looked at me with fear in her eyes after finally breaking away from her view of the passenger’s side window.  “After I ran away from my parents to be with him, he abused me constantly.  I decided that I had had enough and was ready to go on the run again.  That’s when I met you.”  She looked over at the side mirror.  “I just hope he doesn’t find us together, for both of our sake.”  I’m not sure what the odds were of running into this asshole, but they must have been pretty good because at the next gas station, she hopped back into the car after heading out to use the restroom and locked the door quickly behind her. 

A tall man in a leather coat came up to the window and started to bang on it, shouting at her.  “Dessa!  Get your ass out of the car!  I’m not going to tell you twice!”  He pulled out a handgun from his coat pocket and started taunting her with it outside of the window.  Something about Dessa’s look of horror drove me to kill again.  This time, I didn’t hesitate.  I put three bullets into his back and then walked up to make sure I drove the final shot through the back of his head as he collapsed onto the ground.  Dessa waved to me to get in the car and we drove off, leaving his bloody body on the ground.  Dessa thanked me countless times that night.  Something about that experience just drove me to the point where I felt I needed to keep doing this, at least for a while.  And something about the look on Dessa’s expression that night before we stopped off at a hotel told me that we would be in this for the long haul together. 

We had sex that night and it was like almost nothing else I had experienced before.  I felt a certain sense of euphoria when my body was wrapped in hers.  The only thing that brought me more thrills was killing, and that was something we decided to do a lot together.  We started off more honorable, hunting down and killing people on the sex offender registry.  It got to the point where doing this was such a turn on that we often would have sex next to the body and then discard the body after we had pleased ourselves.  However, I could tell that, like the souring of grapes and a wine gone bad, our antics were taking a turn for the worst.  We stopped doing planned killings and just started to kill people we would find doing petty stuff on the streets, kidnapping them and brutally torturing them before killing them.  As much as I wanted all of this to stop, something in me told me that I had to keep going.  It was a carnal drive, unlike anything I had really felt before.  It was like a drug, and each hit needed to be stronger than the last to get the same effect.  Dessa felt the same way.  We both found ourselves killing people just for the sake of wanting to get our rocks off and be able to have sex.  We enjoyed stealing from drug dealers and people who had loose cash, that way we couldn’t be traced as easily as with debit or credit cards.  I loved taking her to get sexy clothing and lingerie that she would wear underneath her darker clothing.  It made the experience of killing someone and having sex afterward all the more appealing.  There’s only so much you can distract yourself from when a rotting corpse starts to empty its bowels around you, but the sweet smell of metallic blood often served as a nice perfume for her.

I couldn’t say that I loved Dessa, but she was probably the closest person I ever had felt affectionate to that wasn’t my Nana.  To her credit though, sex and killing did serve as good substitutes at times.  I had almost forgotten about my plan to go and get the postcard my Nana had always sent me every Christmas.  I had gotten so caught up in the noxious fumes of blood and sex that I had almost forgotten the reason I wanted to head out here in the first place.  I told Dessa what I had wanted to do the first night we were together and she had agreed to accompany me to find that card, but we both had forgotten about that and had gotten addicted to a life of stealing, killing, raping, and taboo sexual intercourse.  Normal drugs just wouldn’t do, although, we substituted our normal cravings with the harder stuff to get by.  Good quality meth was hard to come by and wasn’t cheap, but with how many people we killed and how much we stole, it wasn’t hard to make those ends meet.  Maybe in another life I would have decided to become a meth dealer and have made more money than I do now, but that is something for another lifetime if something like that exists.  I wish I felt bad for what happened just now, but I can’t say that I do.  As much as Dessa and I had a connection, it wasn’t hard to sever that connection when I had to.

We were out on the highway at night, crossing through Oregon as we started to pass into some northern California forests.  I was excited, as some of these trees seemed familiar.  They resembled the trees on the postcards that Nana would send me every Christmas.  I started to speed up and down the road.  Dessa was hyped up on some of the meth that I had bought and didn’t have her seat belt on.  I should have put my arm in front of her, but I wasn’t paying attention.  A deer came up onto the road and I swerved off into a ditch, heading down a ravine and ended up crashing into a tree near a gas station.  The car was wrecked and Dessa was gone in an instant.  I got out of the car and flipped her body over, only to see that a large piece of the windshield glass was imbedded between her eyes.  Her body was warm but limp.  I decided to please myself one last time over her dead body and then left the car there.  The gas station wasn’t that far, so I took most of the cash we had, my phone, and a handgun and made my way to the gas station.  It was about a half a mile away and I walked with a limp.  I tried to dust myself off and wipe the blood off of me before it got crusty, but there was only so much I could do before I came across a stream that ran nearby.  I knelt down and wiped the blood from my face and saw myself clearly for the first time in a long time who I had become.  I had transformed from a fearful boy into a murderous serial killer who just killed his girlfriend and left her body and the car they ran off in to rot.  It was the last shred of guilt I had in my body that I had to suppress as I finished my small hike through the trees to the gas station.  I asked if there was a way I could get a ride, but the cashier said that most of those lift services weren’t available around here.  I was a bit pissed and wanted to kill her right then and there, but I thought better to pull my gun out and decided to look around the store.  Oddly enough, when I went to look at the postcard section near the front, I found it, the same postcard that I was sent every year from my Nana.  I felt happy in a way I hadn’t felt in years and a wave of relief and comfort came over me.  I decided to pay for the card and went on my way.  As I walked out towards what looked like a lake, I noticed how the sun came up and made the trees and sky look almost exactly like the postcard Nana would send me.  For the first time in a very long time, I truly felt like I was alive and felt…content. 

I figured I would write all of this down in case the cops find my body and want to know what the hell happened to me to get me to kill myself by a random lake in the middle of nowhere.  I’m sure the poor bastards who had to read this note on my phone are going to be horrified to know how many people I killed and how many times I had sex with Dessa next to their mutilated corpses.  None of that matters anymore though.  You can think of me as a monster, a killer, a psychopath, or something worse than all of those things combined, but know this, I wasn’t always this way.  It just takes one moment of passion to change everything.  All it takes is someone’s hands around someone’s throat, someone’s flesh up against yours, someone’s handgun being waved in your face, for you to snap and become something like me.  Maybe you’ll do better than me, maybe you’ll do worse, maybe you won’t know that until you’re dead like me, I couldn’t tell you.  All I can tell you now is that, even after killing, raping, and mutilating all of those people and losing everyone I had ever cared about, I finally have my postcard from Nana and I can say with confidence that I have no regrets.