I lived on, obviously.

From my vantage here in the future, I can say that my time at the Radiant ended a month or so later, with a bit of a whimper. Even though I performed one last mission for them that lasted the better part of two years, it hardly counted as part of my “time.” “Time” in that sense takes on two meanings for me now: one in the literal way, where it’s just a passing of seconds, and another in the colloquial way, where it refers more to a prison term. I did my time, I performed my duty. I was punished and now I am reformed.

Although, if I’m being perfectly honest: the jury’s out on the punishment, and the jury’s out on the reformation, too.

About a month from the day when I walked out into the snow, we go to war. The New York gang attacks, and we are deployed on that great grand venture Prochazka so often alluded to. Recalling these days now makes that attack seem like even more of an inevitability than it did at the time. In the moment, if I remember right, it felt like an inevitability in the same way growing up does: it’s something that happens to you, something you come to fill without even meaning to. With the wisdom of hindsight I look back on that four month stretch between me going blind and our deployment on our last mission and I see only a bridge of time: we marched into our future without being able to do a damn thing to stop it. Children don’t really imagine themselves “growing up”—they think that at some point they’ll just wake up as adults. It’s not until someone’s handing you a paycheck for filling out spreadsheets that you realize you’ve made it, you’ve completed the quest, and you’re now in that fabled land we called “adulthood.” Until that point, in your mind, you’re still twelve years old; high school ended a year ago; you graduated last year, didn’t you? Never mind the fact that you’re twenty-five and all of that is a distant memory.

Nothing grows gray hairs quite like remembering the times before them.

I didn’t grow up so much as I was stretched out on a rack.

Some people have the luxury of pinpointing the moment they became an adult, but I don’t. When did I grow up? Did I ever?

God—I was twelve years old when I joined the Radiant. I was twelve years old when I killed a man. I was twelve years old when I learned how to chug a beer, when I dealt blackjack at a table for money. I was twelve years old when I received my first paycheck, bought my first booze.

I can subject myself to all the inquisition I want, seize all my thoughts and pickle them for preservation, I can wrench my mind in every which-way and still never really find an answer. Nothing in this dusty storeroom I call a brain does me any good. The shelves are full of empty boxes. The door swings loose from rusty hinges—there’s nothing, there’s nothing.

Did I grow up the second I got my key? The moment my fingers closed around the metal and it lit up warm in my hand, the bond secured, the flesh chained, the mind unleased? Did that make me an adult? Was it the moment my icicle passed through the neck of some poor schmuck who didn’t know what he’d stumbled into? Was it the taste of alcohol across my lips, the slap of the cards on a table?

Trying to find a spot just makes it seem so silly and trivial. Maybe I came out of the womb as an adult. I certainly had to play my own caretaker most of the time, and that’s what adults do for children like I supposedly was—so if my primary caretaker was me, and not my father, didn’t that make me an adult by itself?

That’s not even accounting for the possibility that I haven’t yet come of age at all. Maybe I’m still a child. In key-terms, where the lifespans of people are generally doubled, the math would check out. I’d be a child until I turn thirty-six, assuming I make it that far.

With the way things are now, worrying about this seems like a bit of a waste of valuable brainpower, but lately that’s just how I’ve been. I have far bigger worries to attend to. The world is not a particularly hospitable place anymore.

Although I suppose it never really was, was it?

I think about these days more now than I ever did in the moment. I was the bottle-up type as a kid. Nobody cared about my problems, so the least I could do was not bother anyone with them. In the long run, that didn’t do me much good, but lots of things I did didn’t do me much good. If I had to rank them all, bottling things up probably wouldn’t make the top five.

Maybe the top ten, though.

The stone of eleven couldn’t possibly begin to dream of what she’d become on her twelfth birthday—well, no. That’s not quite right. She dreamed of it all the time.

Well, barring that, she couldn’t possibly have imagined the world she’d come to inhabit. This place full of magic—well, no, that’s not really true, either. I had to believe in magic. Magic was the only thing that could’ve saved me—so I had to believe in it. My little nightly prayers were answered. I got what I wanted, didn’t I?

Didn’t I always believe in magic?

If not that, then, the eleven-year-old Erika would’ve been completely stunned to see the power she’d hold. I had become something beyond her wildest dreams—no, that’s also not right. My wildest dreams didn’t involve me chained up like I was at the Radiant. In my truly wildest dreams, a lot more people ended up dead. Once I got my key, those dreams shrank in scope pretty significantly, down to just a group of select people—but the scopes of dreams tend to shrink as we get older, anyway, so I think that’s normal.

Even as I’m recalling these things, trying to sort it all out, it’s not obvious. In the moment, I remember, everything was so easy. Everything was so crystal-clear until we went to war—but I can’t find that clarity now.

I want to say I became the sum of my parts, but I’m just not sure I can.

Still, I recall. I recall and relive.

I hope I’ll find an answer one day. I can’t help but feel like the clock is ticking. There are a lot of ticking clocks nowadays. Lots of things, and lots of people, are living on borrowed time—and I, surely, am one of them. Any just universe would have wiped my bug-smear clean a long time ago.

I guess we don’t live in one of those, then.

I wish I had more to offer than empty platitudes and side-mouth promises. I wish I had more to say about this chapter of my life, some kind of conclusion to draw, but I just don’t.

After this, we go to war, and any clarity I may have had in that moment was shattered. That much I know for sure—but still I pursue it. I want that clarity back. That’s why I run through these events over and over again. I want the time when things made sense and life was easy. I want the time when I had friends and a bed and a place to sit and watch the world go by. I want the time when I had a simple job and simple priorities and things still made sense to me.

But with the way things are now, I’m not sure I ever truly had those things. Maybe I’m not special, and what I wanted is just what everyone else wants: my youth back, back and frozen forever, a happy little snow-globe I can run around in circles in.

It feels bad to end this chapter of my life with a shrug, but at the same time, I can’t think of anything more poetic. I shrugged and said “oh well” so many times in my life. Isn’t that what I deserve?

Wouldn’t that be my one, true punishment?

See Erika run. Run, Erika, run—she goes, she goes, and she never stops, and she never rests, and she never finds what she’s looking for.

My own little circle of hell, forever and ever.