I don't think that the fragmentation occurred all that slowly. I might have told myself that, at some point, or several interlinked cross-sections in time, overlapping each other like different dimensions; all telling the same tale. I might have told myself a lot of things, if I'd taken the time to pull apart the threads of the lies that were holding me together. It's just so unfortunate that I actually did just that, deliberately and slowly; carefully lifting the veil of the years, even the ones that had come long before me. I know now that there are things we carry all so unseemingly, like they've been stitched onto our skin; I carry the sight of my mother's eyes on all the Sunday mornings, the pink bathrobe and her raven gaze, all those angry wrinkles, trying to convert the sadness. I know now that this will never pass, and one day she'll be long dead and I'll just be here, still talking to this memory.

In one way or another, the fragmentation happened over night, though it might have taken forever to set in. Parts of my soul are like concrete dreams; everything eventually cracks. And from the cracks there grow nightmares, always nightmares. Because that's all I am; he used to call me monster and then he would stroke my head and hair.

And I guess I had it coming. I used to stand there, in the middle of the storm and the ocean and the drought; and in all the melodrama I kept feeling the approach of something larger. And I guess I told myself that I could. I could. I definitely could. I absolutely could. Whatever would happen next, I could count on myself.

Maybe that's what the fragmentation thought too. That I could count on myself, but not to brace it or win it or defeat it. I could count on myself; let the nightmares seep through the pores, find the cracks and fill the desolation. Somehow keep on fueling the chaos machine; keep on dreaming, keep on escaping, keep on vanishing. Nobody could have known that I would catch up, and then I would fragment. They say you break, they say that the stitches snap, that the wounds tear, that the soul melts. Nowhere on this damn packaging does it say that you will simply dissolve. But you do. You absolutely, definitely, amazingly and wonderfully do. Fragment.