24. Contaminate

Vial in hand – containing what? whatever – I can see the sun’s shine tickling the surface of the town’s water supply, and I automatically recall the first time I was introduced to hate.

As most extreme emotions are born from their opposites, I had first felt love.

Every morning before we had met, I was only troubled by a consistently blissful longing for love, having heard and read so much about it. This desire instilled others: hope, a contentedness, an immersible sense of wholeness that came, paradoxically, with the awareness that something was missing.

Every morning after we had met, I caught the scent of her that lingered in the air from whatever dream my mind had just dismissed, and somewhere in this new routine a process of alchemy forged a different version of myself, one that felt an illusion of completion.

Or perhaps it was genuine, but it certainly was temporary.

Something had been overlooked when this love was produced, some admixture of rogue ingredient, and by the end, we had somehow methodically, yet not consciously, replaced every unit of love with one massive unit of hate. And now when I smell her hair and skin in my waking thoughts, it sets my stomach to boil until nauseated, begging a purge, but you cannot stick a finger down the throat of the past.

The only force of action that can be taken is for the future.

At present, I stand at the rail, overlooking the water that she’ll one day drink, as will the rest of them. The tour group long gone, I uncork the vial and toss it in. I give my eyes to the lens of the nearest security camera, and I wait to be taken away, to be arrested, to hear that the water works will be drained, will be shut down, will be reopened after examination and sterilization, but it never happens.

Now I wait to find out when I’ve officially become a murderer.

 

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