The day I saw myself wave back

They uprooted the bench like a corpse from the earth.

Three of them—young, twitching with energy, shouting things I didn’t catch. The bench groaned under their pulling, its metal legs shrieking as they twisted it loose. It was obscene, how easily they defiled something meant for stillness. I watched, and the old feeling returned.

Rage.

Years of therapy, constraint, hollow apologies. All of it meant to bury what lives beneath. But the sight of that harmless bench—a faithful object, innocent—being violated by idiots with half-formed skulls… the thing in me, the old thing, opened one eye.

I stood.

“Are you going to fix it after you break it?” I said my voice low, steady. The way a storm begins.

They froze. Wide-eyed. I saw the fear, yes—but also defiance. The kind of idiotic defiance that bleeds.

In a breath, my mind filled with images.

One, face-first into the bench, over and over, until his teeth embedded in the wood. Another, neck beneath my arm, twitching until the last rattle. The third… I wanted to feel the soft pop of his eyes under my thumbs. The images didn’t frighten me. They comforted me.

“We… we were just messing around,” one stammered, barely stringing thought to speech.

I don’t recall the moment I moved. Only the aftermath: a crunch, a warmth on my hand, the bench slick and wet. He fell like a broken puppet.

The others ran. I didn’t follow. I had no quarrel with them now.

I looked down. Blood pooled beneath my favourite bench, though I had only just decided it was my favourite. I nudged the body aside with my boot, careful not to stain myself further. I sat.

I was leaving tomorrow, after all. What better way to say goodbye?

Across the park, in the deepening dusk, another bench lay under the shade of an old birch. A man covered in dirt sat there, burly, motionless, hands resting on his knees. He looked like me. No—he was me. Or had been.

He waved.

I looked down. The boy was gone. The blood, too. My hand? Clean. My mind? Not.

When I looked back, the man across the way was holding something in his fist—a limp figure, neck twisted. He grinned at me with a patience that chilled.

And I knew: he was the part I had buried. The one I had tried to forget. My everlasting shadow.

He dug himself out. He knew I needed him.