I am not sure if half of my life actually happened, or if my memory is playing tricks on me.  I dreamt that somebody my mother chained against a wall.  My father called her a traitor to the Motherland.  I heard her tortured every single night at midnight.   When I would come to her aid, father would strangle me.  Eventually, I stopped getting out of bed.  I would choke anyway, as if a demon were strangling me on my father’s behalf.  Sometimes, this still happens to me, when I stay up too late and I’m by myself.  Zoya called this the midnight sickness.

When I turned thirteen, father beat me savagely for asking him about my mother.  He gave me an axe and told me to put my mother out of her misery.  Everything is a blur after that moment.  Father punished me for “killing” her and told me that I was an going to hell.

Sasha says that I would have never done that, and that my father was a sadistic monster trying to brainwash me into believing that I was a murderer in order to cover up his own sick misdeeds.  I know that my father was a prone to fabricating sick tales for his own pleasure, and a psychopath to boot.  For most of my life, I actually believed that I was actually an upir that he adopted and that I killed my “real mother” by ripping my way out of her womb.  When that story crumbled to pieces, he came out with even more outlandish tales. Sometimes, I don’t know what to believe, even though my rational brain tells me that this man was an insane degenerate. He was my father, and every boy wants to believe his daddy.

My mind plays tricks on me when my medications aren’t working right.  It’s time to get my pills adjusted, I think.