The Condition.

“Self-preservation becomes complicated when the threat is internal.” That’s exactly what my notebook has written on itself. I’m not gonna bore you with the classic “dear diary” bullshit. I’m gonna cut straight to the chase. I’m gonna commit suicide. Heh, I wish it was that easy. I’m a coward. I can’t do that. Only the brave are capable of ending it all and reaching the ultimate peace. I’m too scared to look at my own reflection. I need to go, though. This Glock in my hand is being wasted because I’m too much of a pussy to touch the trigger. I need someone else to do it for me.

So I’ve conceived a solution that feels almost elegant in its cowardice: I will arrange a suicide to arrive from outside me. Not an accident. Not chance. Something deliberate, contracted, inevitable. I’ll hire a hitman on myself. The internet has anything and everything nowadays. You can find any service you please. A fixed point moving toward me through time. I imagine the moment of contact the way others imagine vacations or promotions: a scheduled rupture that will finally make each hour beforehand matter. Knowing it’s already set in motion would change the texture of everything, the coffee would taste sharper, the streets brighter, every conversation edged by countdown. My life has been nothing but waiting. At least this way, the waiting would have a date.

I tell myself this isn’t despair but geometry: if I can’t cross the distance to the finish, I can bring the finish across the distance to me. Someone else will carry the certainty I lack. And in the meantime, the mere knowledge that the endpoint is approaching, quiet, unseen, irrevocable, might be the first interesting thing that’s happened to me in years.

The website took effort to find and more effort to believe in. Buried addresses, shifting pages, language that read like contracts written by ghosts. I moved through it the way you move through a dream you’ve decided not to question. There were forms, confirmations, a tone of quiet certainty that made everything feel already decided. I gave them everything they asked for: where the target lived, what he looked like, where he worked, what car he drove. I described him carefully, truthfully. The only thing I never told them was the obvious part: that the target and I were the same person. Services like this don’t like suicide. They want a job, not a confession. If they knew the hit was on me, the contract might disappear before it even began. I didn’t give them my apartment number, however. Let’s see how much of a professional they really are. At the end, there was only a message: a date, a time, a location that was near my apartment, a very strange paragraph with the terms and conditions, and the instruction to be present. No explanations. No names. Just the assurance that someone would recognize me. They just said someone would come and collect the cash.

The page with the terms looked almost ceremonial, too formal for something that lived in shadows. There were conditions written in precise, careful language, not about the method or the place, but about understanding. The contractor must observe the target fully. The target must remain unaltered and unaware of interference. All documentation provided by or about the target would be considered part of the final file. Completion required total psychological clarity. Only when the target was completely known could the outcome be executed. Fulfillment may proceed only upon the Subject’s complete lapse from all sustained external recognition. Four days to be known. Then whatever follows. I remember pausing on that phrasing, the strange emphasis on knowing rather than killing, but I accepted it the way you accept rules in a dream; without asking why they exist, only feeling that they already bind you.

All set and done. No more messages, no more decisions. Only the final certainty stamped into place: exactly four days from now. The precision of it steadied me. For the first time in years, my life had a horizon you could measure, an end already scheduled and moving toward me whether I welcomed it or not. I felt almost electric with it. If something was coming, then I would meet it standing. I wouldn’t sit in this apartment and wait to be found. I would move, vanish, reappear, force the distance to close the hard way. Let it search. Let it follow. A private cat-and-mouse between me and the hitman that had already chosen me. Four days to run, to hide, to make it work for me. Four days to turn the inevitable into a game I intended to play well.

Every morning begins the same way. I wake up before the alarm and stare at the ceiling for a few seconds, waiting for something to feel different. It never does. The same quiet room. The same air that already feels used before I even breathe it in. I lie there and think about how predictable everything is going to be. People call that stability. To me it feels like a machine that forgot to stop running.

Life moves forward, but it never really changes direction. People wake up, go to work, talk about small things, come home, repeat the same movements again the next day. They act like the routine is proof that everything is fine. Like the repetition itself is some kind of victory. I watch them do it and I keep thinking the same thing: how can anyone live like this without noticing how empty it is?

I always believed I was different from them. Not better. Just built wrong in a way that makes their world impossible for me to inhabit. They move through life without asking too many questions. I do the opposite. Every thought I have turns against itself. Every feeling gets dissected before it has time to exist. It’s like my mind refuses to let anything stay simple long enough to feel real. But I won’t lie to you. I’ve spent enough time looking at myself to know the truth. I’m not different in the way I used to think. I’m just weaker. My mother saw that long before I did. She used to look at me with this strange mixture of disappointment and pity, like she had already reached a conclusion about me that I was still trying to avoid. She would say the same two sentences every time we argued.

“You can’t do it.”

“You’re not capable of it.”

At first I thought she was wrong. Later I tried to prove her wrong. But the strange thing about certain words is that they don’t disappear after they’re spoken. They settle somewhere inside you and start repeating themselves. Now those two sentences live in my head like a permanent echo. Every decision I try to make runs straight into them. Every moment of courage collapses the second those words return.

“You can’t do it.”

“You’re not capable of it.”

It doesn’t matter how confident I feel for a moment. It doesn’t matter how much I try to convince myself otherwise. The second those lines appear, everything else disappears. My thoughts shrink. My actions stall. Whatever strength I thought I had dissolves instantly. It’s strange how little it takes to dismantle a person. Some people think destruction requires violence. It doesn’t. Sometimes all you need is the right sentence, placed carefully in the right mind, repeated long enough until it becomes the only voice left inside it. Now you know how to destroy me.

I remember my birthdays when I was a child. I remember staring at all these grown-ups making silly faces and singing really cringy songs to me. I remember them telling me I should smile and celebrate my life. I remember thinking, “humans are fucking retarded.” What a dumb idea to celebrate one’s birthday. You’re not gaining a year, you’re losing one. Each birthday is a countdown. Each birthday is getting you closer to death. And yet people think living is good. They comfort themselves with deception. They tell each other that life creates life. That’s a lie. Everything is destined to die. Every organ in our body is designed to self-destruct. Every clock is assembled toward zero. Leaves grow only large enough to practice falling. Every memory forms at the edge of forgetting. The ink I’m using to write fades, because permanence was never an option. The candle on top of my stupid birthday cake is designed to burn itself into non-existence. Light is assembled from the wreckage of extinguished suns. Suffering is the condition of being alive, death is its completion. Living hurts by default, humans invent reasons to keep doing it. Existence is a slow motion suicide.

There are other things that irk me about humans. They like to believe their lives unfold by accident, but most endings are chosen long before they arrive. They study each other, measure each other, decide silently who is worth keeping and who can be abandoned, who deserves tenderness and who can be erased without consequence. They call it preference, morality, instinct, anything but what it is: quiet verdicts passed inside ordinary moments. I’ve watched them do it with love, with faith, with loyalty, handing each other futures or absences based on nothing more than what they think they see. No one admits how easily a human being can become disposable once fully understood. Knowing is always followed by choosing. It’s the oldest reflex they have; to look at another life and decide what happens to it.

All the measurable victories of my life, salary, titles, the polished lie of success ended here, in this expensive, airless New York City apartment that feels more like storage than shelter. I have the money. I have the job people bend their backs for. And still, none of it has weight. None of it explains why everything feels spent before it’s even lived. No one has ever understood that hollowness. No one except Mila. She saw it without flinching, saw me without the careful edits. And she paid for that clarity with her absence. I’m the reason she isn’t here anymore. The blade that cut deepest was the one that I sharpened myself.

I just woke up. Did I really place a hit on myself? Holy shit. Or was it all imagination? I’m too scared to look at my browser history. I slowly notice the adrenaline rush awakening. I guess we are gonna find out in about 3 days if the hit contract was real or not. I woke up sweating, though. That indicates that it was all real, right? Or is it because it’s hot as hell outside? Ugh, New York summers. It is incredibly sticky and humid. Not to mention how crowded this god-forsaken city is. The streets are filled with filth and desperation. The warmth revealed how temporary cleanliness was. It’s the air that has touched many bodies. Bodies just running around like headless chickens. They have to go to work, they have to go to a museum, they have to catch their friends at the newest coffee shop because Instagram told them to do so. As if any of this matters. I don’t even want to go outside. I do however find my neighbor’s 4-year-old daughter amusing. She is this little girl that’s always kind to me and I don’t understand why. What a silly little creature. She thinks she can give kindness to anyone and everyone and expect it back. I see her every morning in the hallway, and this morning is no different. She’s still there as per usual when I’m leaving to work. She waves at me every morning, and tells me to have a good day. Sweet little girl. Perhaps the only human being that can actually make me truly smile. The only one who stands out in the world full of morons.

Speaking of morons, my coworkers exist in a state of mild animation. They discuss weekends, diets, traffic, streaming shows and the manageable surfaces of living. Their voices carry the steady optimism of people who expect tomorrow to resemble today. I watch them the way one watches a species that thrives in conditions I find uninhabitable. They plan weeks and careers with such carefulness and attention as if time was the resource they owned. I listen and I still don’t get the point. Every task they complete is just a postponement. They speak about progress, improvement, achievement, but all of it moves in the same direction; towards erasure. Watching them arrange their days is like watching people assemble new IKEA furniture in a house that is scheduled for demolition. Everything they do would make sense only if endings didn’t exist. And the only thing that makes sense to me is when they offer me to go to a strip club after work.

I know what you’re thinking. We are the same brain anyway. But it’s not like that. I like noise. I like distractions. The noise is the strip club, and the distraction is a nice pair of tits with some cocaine. Probably the only two good things about this miserable life. Cocaine removes the interior commentary. For an hour, I exist without the opposition. It gives my actions weight it doesn’t deserve. I stop watching myself exist and simply exist. And the women, ah the women. I hate attachments, obviously. I prefer desire that asks me nothing. Being chosen quickly prevents inspection. It reduces the risk of being understood. I like encounters that end before meaning is formed. Predictable desire feels safer than uncertain affection. I prefer women who arrive without prelude and leave without inquiry. When it comes to the titts, physical beauty requires no belief. If God truly exists, and made anything worth preserving, it’s the body of a woman. The attraction for a beautiful face and curvy body needs no explanation. It’s natural. Perfect distraction. All of this keeps reminding me of Mila. The ass on that gyal.... She was a great pole dancer. Way better than all these girls that I’m looking at. But yet, her eyes always made it known to me how much she hated working as a stripper. I better go home now, it’s getting too late.

It must be 3 am now as I arrive in my apartment building. I usually take the stairs whenever I can, but sometimes the elevator is unavoidable. Like tonight, when my legs feel made of wire and I don’t trust them with steps. It’s only four floors, a brief mechanical climb, and still I hesitate before pressing the call button, already feeling that small, crawling resistance under my skin. The doors open with their usual soft parting, and the interior waits: too bright, too enclosed, too polished. I step in anyway and face down, careful about where my eyes settled, watching the numbers instead as they light one by one. The car hums upward, slow and intimate, and the air inside always feels occupied even when I was alone, as if something else rides with me in that narrow box of light. I tell myself it was nothing, just walls, metal, ascent, but every time the doors slide shut behind me, I have the same quiet certainty that one day, on some ordinary ride like this, something in there would finally stop pretending to be harmless. I lean against the mirrored walls, yet I can’t even look up. “Gosh, how long is this ride going to last? Just take me home already,” I mumble as I’m staring at the floor. Luckily I hear the bell sound, must be my exit now.

Let me get my door open so I can finally throw myself to bed. But wait a second. Something feels odd about this apartment. Nothing is broken, nothing seems to be missing, but it seems... altered. Objects seem to remain where I left them, yet arrangement feels subtly incorrect. The kitchen looked normal at first. The same dishes in the rack. The same mug on the counter. I walked past it and then stopped. I always leave the handle facing the sink. Now it was facing the other direction. That’s the kind of detail people say doesn’t matter. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I turned it myself and forgot. But the longer I stood there looking at it, the more certain I became that I hadn’t touched it since yesterday morning. I picked up the mug and turned it back. Then I stopped again. If someone had been in here... why move the cup at all? Unless they wanted to see if I would notice. I left the mug exactly where it was and walked away.

The air feels warmer than it should be, as if someone had just left the apartment. I’m standing right at the doorstep, too worried to walk fully in. The silence doesn’t seem empty, it feels occupied. “Who the fuck is in here?” I scream. No response. It can’t be him can it? You already know who I’m asking about. Yes you do. You know me too well. They said 3 more days though. As I start looking around my apartment, I notice how certain things, like my mail and the pen next to my laptop, aren’t where I left them. Something is odd. But maybe it was me after all. Maybe I just can’t remember anything anymore. I take notes because I’m always losing pieces of what I am. They let me speak to myself when I can’t remember how. They let me speak to you when I’m almost gone.

My heartbeat has slowed, or maybe I’ve only started noticing it again. I need to stop this paranoia. It couldn’t have been him. It was me. I’m the one who moved these things and then forgot, which is exactly the kind of stupidity I’m built from. So I explain it back to myself gently, patiently, the way you calm someone who frightens easily. I turn on the light in my living room and approach my window, and pull my curtain to the side just to make sure nobody’s watching me. Fuck. Who is that? My first thought is that he’s watching me. My second thought is worse, he’s been watching me long enough to know that I would come to this window. He’s wearing a hoodie, I can’t see his face. I just know that it’s directed at me. He isn’t moving. He is looking directly at me. No, it cannot be him. It’s too early for you to visit me. I keep my eyes on the figure long enough for it to thin into possibility, then into error. When I look again, there is only dark and my own outline where he stood. That settles it. Nothing has crossed the distance to me. Nothing has arrived. I let the curtain fall back into place and switch off the light. Sometimes, I have the absurd sense that someone is assembling me in the dark; not watching for movement, but for meaning, as if every detail of me must be accounted for before anything can happen. I must get some rest. Good night now.

The dog again, barking me out of sleep with the same pointless urgency. No one owns it; it simply exists in the neighborhood, unclaimed and unremovable. Whenever I pass, it throws itself at my legs, pressing its body along my pants as if contact alone were his reward. It stares up at me, tail shaking in helpless optimism, and I feel an obscure irritation at the certainty in its eyes. I have never fed it. It knows I have nothing to give. Still it keeps returning, insisting on friendship I never agreed to. I don’t know why it chose me. I don’t know why it keeps believing. I wish I could fall back asleep, however. Mila used to tell me that the dog sees the good in me. Ha, the naivety of this girl. The dog follows my hand as if the motion itself were authority, never questioning what it means or why it should matter. There is no understanding in it, only response. Humans aren’t so different. They obey shapes and signals they do not emotionally grasp. What good can this poor little bastard see in me? You know I’m right. You know how empty I am better than anyone else.

“God is love. Love is life. The Devil is what takes the life out of love.”

She lived by that. Whenever she sensed confusion in me, she would repeat it with the same small, patient smile, as if the truth were simple and I had merely misplaced it. Love. What a dumb idea that they invented. Love is the lie they tell each other to make dependency sound noble. I’ve watched them ruin their lives over a feeling that fades faster than pain. They call it unconditional, until the conditions change. They say it makes you human, well maybe that’s the problem. I call it surrender. It’s a game designed for those who are afraid of silence. They love, I observe. They feel, I calculate. I’m not like them. I can’t do it, I’m not capable of it.

I met Mila under the violet haze of a strip club stage. She was unmistakably beautiful in the way that made the room feel slightly rearranged around her. Her body carried a soft, dangerous symmetry, big perky boobs that rose and fell with an unstudied heaviness, a narrow waist that gave way to generous hips, and dancer-strong thighs that moved with quiet assurance beneath her steps. There was nothing sharp about her. Every line of her seemed shaped to be touched, to be held. I stood there and stared like an idiot while she moved around the pole, her body slick with sweat under the lights. It ran down between her boobs, over the soft weight of them, along her belly to the curve of her hips and the round pull of her ass as she turned. Everything about her was alive and warm and impossibly close, and I couldn’t stop watching the way her thighs tightened, the way her chest rose with breath, the shine of her skin. She was pure heat in motion. I was mesmerized. Her hair fell in loose brunette curls that caught the light in warm threads, framing a face too open for the world she lived in. Wide, luminous eyes that seemed always on the verge of saying something truer than speech. Men saw the seduction first. It was impossible not to. But if you looked longer, you sensed the trembling sweetness beneath it, the softness that had somehow survived everything, and that was what made her beauty feel almost unbearable to witness. She owned that stage. There was no one like her. She moved with the ease, borrowed brightness she gave to everyone, until she saw me. Then her smile fell away, not in rejection but in recognition, as if she had just remembered something she had lost. It startled me, the way her face softened into a quiet seriousness meant only for me, and from that moment we spoke without effort, as though we had already been speaking somewhere else for years. She hated it whenever I tried to tip her. The bills looked wrong in my hand, contaminated by every other hand that had pressed them into hers with expectation attached. She would flinch, offended, not at the amount, but at the meaning. She did not want my money; she did not want me to stand among the others, reduced to a transaction, another face dissolving into the blur of men she endured. To her, I was supposed to be separate from that world, untouched by its appetite. My offering felt like a betrayal of that difference, a quiet confession that I belonged to the same species after all. And she knew I wasn’t like them, or needed to believe I wasn’t. So she pushed the notes back toward me as if returning something that should never have crossed the distance between us.

She was the daughter of Russian immigrants who had carried their winters into New York and left them inside her. She lived apart from them now, orbiting her own small, wounded gravity. There was a sweetness in her that survived everything; an abused childhood, an alcoholic father, the careful distance she kept from her past, and yet it made her seem breakable, like fragile glass. A small Orthodox Christian cross rested always at her throat, glinting when she moved, the only constant she trusted. And then there was her other devotion: Greece, its myths, its ruins, its tragic gods. She spoke of them with a strange tenderness, as if she recognized in their broken immortality the shape of her own.

Mila never looked at people the way others did. Where most eyes search for flaws, exits, reasons to withdraw, hers seemed to settle and stay, as if once she recognized a person she had already chosen them. It confused me, the way she held on without calculation, without weighing what someone deserved. She spoke about love like it was a decision made before judgment, something you offered not because a person was worthy but because they existed at all. I used to think it was naivety, this refusal to discard, this stubborn keeping of things everyone else would have set down. But there was something frightening in it too; the quiet power to look at another human being fully and still decide: you remain.

All my memories of her returning, like they have been waiting behind a door. Her voice comes with them; soft, warm, unmistakable. I could never confuse that voice with anyone else’s. It moves through my head and settles in my chest, and suddenly I remember the weight of the mask I used to wear. The careful face I carried for the world. I shaped it every morning: the right smile, the right nods, the right empty words. A human costume stitched from other people’s expectations. They spoke and I answered, but nothing in me touched them. I watched their laughter, their anger, their small daily dramas, and felt only distance, like glass between us. Inside, there was always a second voice; mine, asking why I could not feel what they felt, why I could not be what they were. So I wore the mask tighter, until even my own thoughts sounded muffled behind it.

I learned early that a face could be assembled the way one assembles polite sentences; piece by piece, according to what the room required. It was not deceit so much as adaptation, like an animal growing the coloration of its enclosure. The mask smiled when expected, winced on cue, nodded at the correct intervals, and in this way moved through human company without incident. Beneath it, something unfinished watched and memorized. I sometimes imagined the mask slipping, not dramatically, just a small misalignment at the mouth or eyes, and felt a disproportionate dread, as if a private deformity might suddenly be exposed to daylight. It was not that the hidden face was monstrous in any visible way, it was worse: it had no agreed shape at all, no expression that corresponded to theirs, no grammar of feeling they could recognize. To see it would not frighten them because it was savage, but because it was incompatible, a human outline containing an absence where mutual understanding should be. And so I kept the mask well-fitted, not to deceive others, but to spare them the vertigo of meeting a person whose interior did not translate into the human world.

“Stop wearing it.”

I freeze. The room in my mind shifts.

“I can’t” I tell her. “The world would not understand me.”

“I would. Fuck what the world thinks.”

I say nothing.

“It doesn’t matter if the world understands. I do. Just be yourself with me baby. You don’t need that mask. I’m not afraid of what you hide.”

And for the first time, the mask in my hands feels heavier than my face.

Mila watched me for a while, the way she sometimes did when she thought I wasn’t paying attention.

“You watch people too much,” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“You study them like they’re something to solve. You analyze them, read them, figure them out.”

She tilted her head slightly.

“But you never feel them.”

I shrugged.

She smiled like it didn’t matter.

She spoke about God the way children speak about someone who lives in the next room. Close, watchful, always listening. Her faith was simple and stubborn, steeped in Orthodox prayers and the quiet certainty that something holy followed her steps. She feared the devil with equal innocence, as if evil were a presence you might brush against on a dark street, and she said she believed so fiercely only because she trusted God to keep that presence away. Sometimes she showed me the little book she was writing but never meant to share. A story that was half diary, half dream, about a small girl who believed in miracles and in a guardian angel that came to her each day in the shape of a bird. The girl would whisper to the bird, and the bird would teach her gentle rituals: like holding her own wrist tight and closing her eyes to pray whenever she felt her soul escaping her body. She told it all with a soft, almost embarrassed sweetness, as if she knew how childish it sounded and yet needed it to be true.

I didn’t know what to do with a person who spoke to me as if there were no glass between us. All my life I had worn myself like a costume no one noticed, a careful arrangement of gestures and laughter that passed for a man. And then she said it quietly, almost carelessly that I didn’t have to hide. The words did not comfort me, they exposed me. It felt obscene, like being seen undressed in a room where I had always believed myself invisible. Being alone had always been a clean terror, a familiar emptiness I could control. But being understood was worse. It dragged me out of the safe darkness and pinned me in a light I had never agreed to stand in. With her, I could no longer pretend I was only the mask, yet I did not know how to exist without it. So her closeness became another kind of suffocation; the unbearable nearness of someone who could touch the raw, unfinished thing beneath, and believed it deserved to live. This is exactly why I fear you. You know me too well. You read me, and it terrifies me.