Hunger.

Hunger was the first sensation I ever felt. The first motivation I ever had. The first system I ever learned to decode.

My beginnings? Poverty. A place that is so boring and forgotten that not even natural disasters cared to pass by. With my father gone, the entire weight of our survival fell on my mother, even if I tried hard to carry a bit of that. As her only child, I watched her erase her own needs just to keep me breathing. I noticed how she would give me parts of her own food so my portions were whole, even if she said we were “even”, and how the fabric of her own worn clothing would vanish, only to reappear later as a patchwork on mine. It was an economy of absolute sacrifice, and I absorbed every damned penny.

I actually lied before. One thing did care for this dusty town: the military. We were in the middle of war, a selfish, gruesome, and unforgiving war as all war is, and they were blind enough with hope and drunk enough with power, that they resorted to forced conscription. They didn't ask, nor even warn; I was simply torn apart from my two-person family, as a rabid dog tears apart the vivid, pulsating flesh of an innocent boy’s arm, and thrown into a compound alongside other kids.

That place was a factory designed to break us. The training was unimaginably rigorous, crossing the line into relentless physical abuse and outright torture.

Or maybe the physical abuse and torture were crossing the line into training, who knows.

Every day was a lesson learned through pain, tearing my muscles down and forcing them to rebuild with whatever minimal nutrients my body had left, only to tear them down again. But the physical beatings were only a side effect. They deliberately forced us to never show a single ounce of emotion. Any flinch, any tear, was punished until my default operational state became absolute, cold suppression. Being naturally analytical and a “watch first, act later” kind of person, this hardwired modus operandi became my conditioned way, my default state, my shield.

But every volcano has to erupt some day. You cannot stop nor contain a force of nature.

One day, after constant torture, my ego finally stepped in. Under the cover of darkness, I began probing the others into escaping. Some —or actually most of them— immediately rejected my idea with their eyes filled with the fear of a man that has seen every single horror in existence. I couldn't blame them, but I also couldn't do it by myself. As much of a powerhouse that I am, I was severely outnumbered, so I did what I knew then best:

Manipulation.

I started to spread rumors about extreme torture and flat out murder planned from the upper people, without any sense of justice or system —which this compound had, although in their own twisted way.

Having kicked off the paranoia of a few of them, I began hosting illegal midnight meetings with the other kids, who were now teens like me. We forged a plan to escape the compound. Because of my natural pattern recognition and my ability to read systems, I was able to easily map out a breakout.

Don't ask me about the details because I honestly can't remember.

Still, the plan only partially succeeded. The chaos of the escape and the hesitation of a few, triggered an alarm, followed by a cascading failure of environmental hazards—explosions tore through the perimeter, and falling debris rained down on us. My spatial awareness allowed me to dodge the hazards, but the others lacked that terrifying precision. A total of fifteen kids wore their hopes and wishes on their chest that night, only for one to keep them. I was the only one who made it out alive. I watched the rest of them being torn away by the guards or crushed by the collapsing environment of our own escape. Fourteen wills were left behind in the mud.

Once I was finally out, and after a long, long walk, I managed to flag down a stranger who gave me a lift. Shocked by my appearance, I had to tell her that I was just a random homeless guy trying to get into town for a place to sleep. The compound must have taken a toll on my physique as well since she believed I was way older than I actually was.

It seemed like pity back then, but I'm daring to say her empathy was what drove her to allow me to sleep at her house. She was a single mother of three which lowered my defenses a little bit. Still, I desperately longed for human connection, a profound need to just belong somewhere, yet I simultaneously felt fundamentally superior and vulnerable to everyone else around me.

Kinda fucked up right? I know.

After having a very anxious shower —making sure every second no one was watching me—, and a very anxious meal —making sure the food wouldn’t go away before I was full— , I silently cried myself to sleep.

I was safe, but the war inside my head had only just begun.