тоска: A Murderer's Confession

I never put much stock in the concept of a soul, until I began to kill.

No, that is not quite accurate. Let me start again. Language is always like this—it slips away just at the crucial moment, like trying to cup a breath of air in one’s palms. What I mean to say is: I never felt the existence of a soul until I began to slice into skin—my own skin.

Before that, I was merely a walking outline. You must have seen such people—on the Underground, in the frozen aisle of the supermarket, at any pedestrian crossing waiting for the lights to change. Our eyes share a similar quality, something that has already been extinguished but has yet to realise it is out. Or perhaps, it never burned in the first place. We have simply mimicked the shape of a flame for so many years that we have even deceived ourselves, until one overly quiet night, we suddenly discover there is nothing in the chest cavity but the sound of the wind. We recognise one another. Then, we swiftly look away. For to gaze into a mirror for too long is to invite madness.

Look at us, creatures of such loneliness and shame. We are so desperate to be seen by another existence that we would tear open our own chests to show others what is kept inside—yet when someone actually draws near, they discover it is hollow, absolutely empty, and so people dare not do it again. That desire is stretched out like sticky treacle—stretched longer and longer, thinner and thinner, until it becomes a nearly transparent filament suspended between oneself and others; touch it and it snaps, yet one cannot bear to leave it be. That sentiment drips like pitch, slowly, silently, dripping towards a void that can never be touched—it is not even a sky, for the sky at least has a name, it has clouds, it has birds, it has the qualification to be looked up to. The thing we crave does not even possess a name.

Please forgive these clumsy metaphors. I truly do not know how to name this sensation. Later, I found a word in the margins of an old book: тоска. Toska. The author of that book was Nabokov—a Russian writing in English, an exile drifting between two languages all his life. He attempted to explain this word to his English readers; he wrote: No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, a yearning.

Without any specific cause. That is precisely the most terrifying part, is it not? If pain has a cause, you can fight it, remove it, or at least pretend there is a possibility of removing it. The heartbroken can wait for new love. The poor can fantasise about wealth. A person trapped in a situation can plot an escape. But a pain without cause—a pain that is pure, autonomous, self-generating without the need for any external object—how do you escape that? Where do you flee? You are the container of that pain; wherever you go, it is inside you.

In certain particular cases, Nabokov says, it may be the desire for somebody or something, nostalgia, love-sickness.

But this is Toska’s disguise. It is a temporary coat it wears. When it masquerades as a longing for someone, you think finding that person will cure it. When it masquerades as nostalgia, you think returning home will quell it. When it masquerades as a desire for a specific life or status, or for things not yet possessed, you think obtaining those things will fill it.

And so, you chase. You fall in love. You travel. You make money. You acquire, possess, accumulate. You think you are nearing relief. Then you get it. And then you discover the hole is still there. It has not grown any smaller. It has simply changed its shape, shifted its position, adopted a different method of hunger. You realise the thing you were chasing was never the true target—it was merely a direction Toska pointed to at random, a lure to fob you off.

However, when Toska is diluted to a weak enough concentration, when that sharp agony is ground down by time into a dull, chronic background noise that can almost be ignored, it becomes ennui. It becomes that afternoon where you sit by the window watching the rain fall, feeling that everything is meaningless but unable to say why. It becomes that night at a party where you are surrounded by crowds yet feel a bone-deep loneliness. It becomes that emptiness where you have completed everything you ought to have completed, yet feel you have done nothing at all.

Most people live on this level. For most, their Toska has been domesticated, socialised, diluted to a concentration that allows for continued normal function. They feel bored, they feel empty, they feel a dissatisfaction they cannot articulate, but these feelings are not strong enough to make them stop and question. So they carry on. They continue to work, continue to consume, continue to entertain themselves, continue to fill every second with all manner of noise, leaving themselves no gap to hear the echo of that hole.

I drew many lines under that word until the paper frayed. It turned out I was not the only one. If people were experiencing the same thing hundreds of years ago—if Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina felt it before she threw herself beneath the train, if Dostoevsky’s Underground Man was tormented by it in his damp hole, if countless Russian poets wrote countless lines for it before ending themselves on some winter’s night—if hundreds of years later people still experience it, still find this word in the margins of a book and draw lines under it—

Then this hole is not my personal illness at all. It is a disease of the human species itself. It is a cancer of consciousness. A side effect of language. The price that must be paid for self-awareness. It has no cure. Or rather—and this is what I slowly came to realise—it does have a cure, but that medicine is sold in no pharmacy, prescribed in no clinic, listed in no treatment plan sanctioned by society. That medicine must be compounded by oneself. It requires a knife, needle and thread, and flesh and blood that does not belong to you.

But that came later. Let me first continue to recount how I arrived at that point.

Let me rewind a little, for a story must have its archaeology. You want to know how I became this way, as if there exists a clear 'before' and 'after', separated by some traumatic event—a bolt of lightning, a gunshot, a door slammed shut forever on some childhood afternoon. This is how you understand the world: chains of causality, dominoes, Freudian childhood shadows. You require a narrative, a moment you can point to so you can say: Look, it was here, this is where it went wrong. But I must disappoint you. There was no such moment. There was no violent father, no absent mother, no dark secret in the cellar, no source whatsoever that an adult could trace whilst lying on a chaise longue in a therapist’s office.

My childhood was banal to the point of cruelty. I remember the way the sunlight came through the curtains. Those cheap, thin white curtains, washed too many times, the edges slightly yellowed. The sun would filter through, casting a blurred patch of light on the floorboards, dust motes dancing within it. I could stare at those motes for a long time. They suspended, spun, and sank without purpose, occasionally swept up by an invisible current of air, only to continue suspending, spinning, and sinking without purpose. I also remember the conversations at the dinner table. About the weather—it’s brisk today, looks like rain, a bit warmer than yesterday. About tomorrow—early start tomorrow, remember your umbrella, haven’t decided what to buy for dinner tomorrow. About those plans that would never truly happen—when the holidays come we’ll go away somewhere, when we’ve saved enough we’ll replace that old sofa, it’ll be better when you’re a bit older. I remember sitting there, chewing, swallowing, nodding, smiling, using my chopsticks to push the rice in my bowl into a little hill and then flattening it, pushing it into a hill and flattening it again, whilst deep inside a hysterical screaming howled: Is this it? Is this the lot? Is this really all there is?

I did not know how to articulate it back then. I assumed everyone was like this—that beneath the skin lay a void, a hole that could never be filled. I assumed we simply never spoke of it, just as we never speak of death or excretion. And growing up is the process of learning to ignore that hollow. You fill it with homework, with jobs, with promotions and pay rises, with the things you can afford becoming increasingly expensive. You fill it with love—the first flutter of the heart, the first kiss, the first time waking in another’s arms, thinking you have finally found that missing piece of the puzzle. You fill it with friendship, with socialising, with 'likes' on social media and birthday messages. You fill it with the illusion of meaning—I want to be a useful person, I want to make the world a better place, my life must have value. Some fill it with God, going to church once a week to outsource the hollowness to a grander narrative. Some fill it with art, briefly forgetting their own ugliness within the beauty created by others. Some use alcohol, pills, all manner of chemical agents to numb the hole temporarily.

We have constructed an entire set of intricate defence mechanisms: the illusion of meaning, the myth of progress, the promise of an afterlife, the fairy tale that love will save you, the delusion that children will continue your legacy. You have outsourced your own emptiness to religion, to the nation, to capitalism, to family, to career, or to so-called self-actualisation.

I tried them all. None of them worked. Or rather, each worked for a spell, and then failed. Like antibiotic resistance, the void learned to adapt to everything I fed it, and then it grew larger, deeper, more ravenous. Until one day I realised: it is not in me. It is me. I am not a person who possesses a void; I am a void existing in human form. My skin, my bones, my organs, my memory, my personality—they are merely a coat the void has donned in order to walk in the world.

The first time was an accident. Or rather, I am willing to believe it was an accident, for that allows me to retain a shred of innocence in this narrative. But to be honest, there are no true accidents in this world. Every event is the inevitable consequence of all that came before; we are simply unable to trace the full length of that causal chain.

That night, I was dissecting a rabbit purchased from the market. I cannot recall precisely when this habit began. Perhaps it was one day at the market, seeing those skinned rabbits on the stall—pink muscle exposed to the air, eye sockets hollow, limbs pointing stiffly in four different directions. I stared at them for a long time, until the stallholder asked if I was actually going to buy one. I did.

I relish that sensation—the slight resistance as the blade glides through fascia, the way muscle fibres part beneath the fingertips, blood vessels meandering like tiny rivers between the tissues. It is a beauty of a geometric order. The construction of life is so precise, so incredible; every muscle sits exactly where it ought to be, every nerve connects precisely where it must, yet we inhabit this architecture completely unaware, like a fish that never pauses to consider the water.

That night, the kitchen light was white—a fraction too bright—rendering everything devoid of shadow. The rabbit lay on the chopping board, its belly already laid open by my hand, the organs stacked neatly on a plate beside it. I recall a faint scent of blood in the air; not unpleasant, merely a touch sweet. My hands were stained with blood that had begun to dry, turning into a dark crimson film. Outside, cars occasionally passed, their headlights sweeping across the curtains before vanishing.

I do not know what compelled me to do what followed—perhaps it was mere curiosity. As I slid my hand into that rabbit’s chest cavity, feeling those soft, warm tissues (no, in truth they were cold, yet my memory insists upon their warmth) enveloping my fingers, a thought suddenly struck me: What would happen if I put this inside my own body?

—The thought arrived with such calm, such naturalness, like thinking I must buy milk tomorrow or the window seems to be left open. There was no dramatic prelude, no devil’s whisper, no angel’s intercession. Just a thought, surfacing from the void and hovering there, waiting to be executed.

I looked at the inside of my left arm. The skin there is thin, white to the point of translucence; one can see the pale blue veins forking underneath like tree roots. I have never felt that it was my arm. I have never felt that this body was mine. It is merely a vessel I happen to inhabit, a garment I did not choose. I picked up another knife, smaller and sharper. I remember washing it. With washing-up liquid, followed by scalding water. This detail amuses me—that on the brink of an act of madness, I still remembered to sterilise. Human reason is like that; it functions in any scenario, including those it ought to prevent.

I pressed the blade against my skin. It was cold. Then I applied a little pressure. Pain was present, certainly. But it was not the pain I had anticipated. I expected something sharp, violent, like a burn or a needle prick. In reality, it felt more like being roused from a deep sleep. My body suddenly realised it was here, realised it existed, realised it was composed of matter that could be sliced. The incision was perhaps three centimetres long, not deep, merely breaching the epidermis and a fraction of the dermis. Beads of blood oozed from the edges, slower than I had imagined, the colour more vivid. I stared at the cut, feeling a strange intimacy. It was as if I was truly seeing my interior for the first time. As if someone had opened a tiny window in a sealed wall.

I excised a small morsel of flesh from the rabbit. Muscle from the hind leg, about the size of an almond. I used tweezers—another inexplicable detail (that I possessed tweezers at all), and that I knew to use them—to place it inside the incision. I sutured the wound using a technique I had learned on the internet. Thread the needle, pull, knot. My hands were steady. This surprised me somewhat. By the third stitch, I realised I was humming. Perhaps a nursery rhyme from childhood, perhaps something random from the radio. Once stitched, I dressed the wound with gauze and secured it with medical tape. The entire process took twenty minutes. Outside, the sky was still black, the street still silent, nothing in the world had changed—save for a small piece of tissue that did not belong to me, now residing within the inside of my arm.

Then I waited—waited for infection, for fever, waited for the skin to turn red and inflamed. I waited for rejection, for my immune system to attack the invader, break it down, and expel it. I almost anticipated that result, for then it would merely be a failed experiment, an absurd night, a foolishness to be forgotten.

But nothing happened. One day, two days, three. I unwrapped the gauze every few hours to look. The edges of the wound began to knit, new skin growing from both sides, slowly, patiently, like two continents drifting towards one another. There was no pus, no odour, no sign that the body was refusing it. By the fifth day, the incision had become a thin pink scar. By the tenth, the scar began to fade. That piece of rabbit remained within me, became part of me. My body accepted it, as one accepts a stray child.

That night—the night I placed it inside—I lay in bed, holding up my left arm, gazing into the darkness at the spot covered by gauze. I could feel it. Presence. A weight, a temperature, a sensation that something was there. For the first time, I slept for ten solid hours. No nightmares, no jolting awake at three in the morning. None of that sensation of lying there staring at the ceiling, feeling myself slowly draining away through an invisible leak. Only darkness, silence, and a peace I had never experienced.

You are perhaps expecting me to tell you that between rabbit flesh and human flesh there lay a long, downward slope, fraught with struggle, hesitation, and moral decline. You want to hear a story of slow corruption—how one day I used rabbit, another I began to fantasise about cats, how one day I stood too long outside a pet shop, how one day I first harboured improper thoughts towards a stranger, how I almost acted but withdrew the knife at the last moment. You want a traceable trajectory, so you can point to a node and say: Look, it was here; if someone had stopped them here, if there had been a good psychiatrist, if they lived in a more caring society, if someone had just happened to make a phone call that night...

That way, you can continue to believe: monsters are manufactured, they do not simply grow. That way, you can continue to believe that between you and me there exists a series of clear steps that can be identified and interrupted. But there was no such slope. No struggle, no hesitation, no moral decline. There was only a leap. A clear, almost logically necessary leap. Like the 'Q.E.D.' in a mathematical proof.

The peace brought by the rabbit flesh lasted only three days. On the first day, I woke feeling an unprecedented lightness. It would be hard to call it happiness—I doubt I have ever truly experienced the meaning of that word—but rather a quietude. That thing which is forever screaming had temporarily shut its mouth. I lay in bed, listening to the birds outside and the distant traffic, feeling for the first time that these sounds were not attacking me, but simply existing. It took me a long time to realise this is what is called 'normal': that peace treaty with the world that most people take for granted every morning.

On the second day, the calm remained, but the edges began to blur. Like a cup of tea left too long, losing its heat. I found myself pressing the stitched spot on my inner arm from time to time, feeling the presence of the foreign object beneath the skin. It was still there. It was real. I was not dreaming.

On the third day, when I woke, the hole was back. It rose slowly like a tide. First a vague unease, then a familiar hollowness, then that hunger I thought had been filled—it had never left, it was merely digesting. Now it was finished, and it was hungry again. And it was hungrier than before, because it had tasted satisfaction. It knew what it was like to be filled, and it could no longer accept emptiness. So I cut myself again. The same location, slightly lower, avoiding the old wound that hadn't fully healed. Another piece of rabbit. Another suture. That night, the peace returned.

But this time it lasted only two days. I began to test different variables. Perhaps it was a question of dosage? I increased the quantity. Perhaps location? I moved to different parts of the body. Perhaps the material? I switched to lamb. Then beef. Then pork. I even tried chicken, though its fibrous structure was too loose, leaving me with an indescribable dissatisfaction while stitching, like painting with the wrong pigment.

Every new material brought a brief improvement—novelty itself seemed to be a kind of filler. But the improvements grew shorter, the decay faster. The numbers in my notebook grew denser, the curve dipping steeply downwards. Eventually, the peace from beef lasted less than twelve hours. I had to cut myself twice a day to maintain a basic equilibrium. My body began to be covered in scars, like a piece of draft paper that has been scribbled over too many times.

As with all addictions, the threshold kept rising. And the speed at which I could supply it could not keep pace with the speed at which it took. There were nights I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, feeling a familiar despair returning. I thought I had found a path, but that path was vanishing beneath my feet. I began to suspect this whole affair was a colossal mistake. Perhaps the hole was unfillable. Perhaps I should be like everyone else, learn to coexist with it, learn to pretend completeness within the void. I should dig the fragments of rabbit and sheep and cow out of my body, let the wounds infect, let the fever come, let everything return to square one.

But I did not. Because one day—an ordinary morning without any omen—while watching a stranger opposite me on the Tube, I suddenly knew. It was an entirely unremarkable person. I do not even remember what they looked like. Their clothes, their hairstyle, their age; these details have blurred in my memory like an overexposed photograph. But I remember the feeling of that moment.

The train was moving through the tunnel; outside the window was pitch black, with occasional flashes of light. The lighting in the carriage was that pallid fluorescent glare, rendering everyone’s face a little distorted. Some were on their phones, some dozing, some staring vacantly into the darkness outside. There was a mixed smell in the air—sweat, perfume, breakfast sandwiches, the metallic and rubbery scent unique to the Underground. The announcement sounded and faded; no one was listening.

I sat in my seat, feeling the hole pulsing in my chest like a famished heart. It had been over twenty-four hours since I had performed any filling, because the last piece of beef had been effective for less than six hours, and I could find few new places on my body to make an incision. I was tired, like a traveller who has walked a great distance only to discover they have been walking in circles. Then I looked up and saw that person. For no particular reason. My gaze just happened to land there. They were looking at their phone, or the window, or just zoning out. I looked at them—no, I looked at their silhouette. Their skin. The flesh beneath their skin.

The thought arrived with such calm, such quietude, such matter-of-factness. It was not a dramatic moment of enlightenment like a clap of thunder, but more like a drop of water falling into a lake. A leaf falling from a tree. Something that should have happened long ago had finally happened. The train arrived at the station. The doors opened, the crowd surged in and out, and the stranger vanished into the throng. I sat motionless in my seat, letting the train carry me forward. My heart rate was steady, my breathing even, my hands did not tremble. If anyone had looked at me in that moment, they would have seen only an ordinary passenger, a tired commuter on a morning journey just like them.

I am not defending myself. I do not need your forgiveness, just as a river does not need your permission to flow downwards. I am simply demonstrating the thought process of that moment to you. It was clear, self-consistent, possessing even a strange beauty—the kind of beauty one finds only in mathematical proofs or precision machinery. Everything fit seamlessly. Everything was exactly right.

My first—

No, let me choose a different word. "Victim"—this word has bothered me from the moment I typed it. It bothers me not because of any moral discomfort—that sort of unease requires a neural circuitry I do not possess—but because it is inaccurate. Language is intended to illuminate things, but the wrong word casts a shadow. The word "victim" implies a specific relationship: a perpetrator and a sufferer; an active agent and a passive one; a wolf and a lamb. It implies that I inflicted something upon them, suggesting that their existence was, to me, accidental, fungible, unimportant.

But that is not true. That was not our relationship. Let me use another word: Material. I know how that sounds. Cold. Dehumanising. The sort of vocabulary a Nazi doctor might employ. You are likely knitting your brows as you read this, likely affixing yet another label to me in your mind. But please allow me to explain, for the choice of this word is crucial to me; it pertains to the very essence of the matter.

I call them "Material" not because I deny they were once human. Quite the contrary. It is precisely because they were human that they held value. If they were not human, if they were merely a heap of meat one could purchase at the market, then why would I have gone to such lengths? I experimented with rabbit, lamb, and beef for so long, with diminishing returns, precisely because those things lacked a certain essence that only humans possess. I cannot articulate what that is—perhaps it is pheromones unique to the species, or perhaps my brain simply recognised a mirror image within the tissue of its own kind—but it is real.

Their humanity is their value. But in that specific context, within that formula for filling the void, their function was that of material. Just as a sculptor speaks of marble. Marble was once part of a mountain—let me be more precise—marble once was the mountain. It has endured tectonic movements, aeons of heat and pressure, the infiltration of groundwater and the precipitation of minerals. It has its own geological history, its own grain and fissures, its own unique, unrepeatable trajectory of existence. But when it is hauled into the sculptor’s studio, when the chisel first strikes its surface, it transforms into a vessel of possibility. Its past is not denied, but its future is redefined. It is to become something more than "a stone".

I hold the same respect for my Material. Perhaps this is something you cannot comprehend; perhaps to your ears, this sounds like the self-aggrandisement of a murderer. But I need to say it, for if I do not, I am lying to myself, and the entire point of this confession is honesty.

The birth of my first Material took place about three weeks after the plan formed. I spent three weeks preparing. Not the sort of preparation you see in crime films—casing the joint, stalking, studying schedules and the like. My preparation was more akin to an internal calibration. I needed to confirm I was serious, confirm this was not a momentary impulse, not some mad notion from the dead of night that would evaporate in the light of day. I needed to construct a complete, self-sustaining logical structure within myself, so that when I actually made my move, I would not hesitate, I would not tremble, I would not be dragged back at the final moment by some residual instinct of socialisation. For three weeks, every night, I rehearsed it in my mind. Every morning, I checked if my resolve remained intact. It was intact. It was better than intact—it was growing, maturing, becoming increasingly solid.

Then came that night. The person I chose to stay overnight in the park, I chose for no particular reason—and that itself is the point. If I had chosen a specific person for a specific reason—because they looked like someone who once bullied me, because they reminded me of a traumatic memory, because a look or a word from them had offended me—then the act would have become personalised. It would have degenerated from a pure metaphysical experiment into an emotional outburst, an act of revenge, a symptom of pathology. It would have become something you could understand, something that could be slotted into your diagnostic manuals, reduced to a delayed reaction to some childhood trauma.

But that was not what I was doing. I was conducting an experiment on an ontological level. I was answering a question about existence itself. To maintain the purity of the experiment, the selection of the Material had to be random. I needed the category of "Human", the universal concept, not a specific individual with a name and a story. Any person would do. This "any" was sacred. It guaranteed the universality of the result.

It was an early autumn night. Or perhaps late summer. I cannot recall the exact date, but I remember the temperature of the air—neither cold nor hot, exactly that temperature where one could stay outdoors all night without discomfort. After 2 a.m., the park was almost deserted, save for the occasional drifter and those with nowhere else to go. The streetlamps cast patches of orange light, leaves rustled in the breeze, a dog barked in the distance, or perhaps it was some other animal.

I had been walking in this park for several nights. I knew its topography, knew which corners had CCTV, which paths saw foot traffic, which benches were obscured just so by the shrubbery. I do not intend to detail these technicalities—not because I am hiding anything, but because they are unimportant. They are merely means. I wish to speak of the end.

The person lay on a bench, cardboard beneath them, covered by a filthy coat. I could not see their face clearly—the streetlight did not reach that corner, and to be honest, I deliberately avoided looking. I did not want to know what they looked like. I did not want to know their age, where they came from, why they were sleeping in a park. Such information would turn them into a "person", a person with a story, whereas I needed them to remain "Material".

I stood nearby for a long time. Perhaps five minutes, ten, or longer. I was waiting for a signal—some resistance from within, a rejection from my body, an alarm from that moral sense everyone is said to possess. I gave them ample opportunity. I told myself: If in the next sixty seconds you feel any hesitation—any hesitation at all, even a shred—you will turn and walk away, and never come back.

Sixty seconds passed. Nothing happened. My heartbeat was steady. My hands did not shake. My mind was clear, like a room that had been thoroughly scrubbed.

I will not describe what happened next. That is not the point. In reality, it was much quieter and cleaner than you imagine. I omit the description because if I were to describe it, you would be trapped by those images; you would read on carrying those images with you, and they would float like a film of oil over the surface of everything that follows, preventing you from seeing what lies beneath the water.

Let me skip to later that night, when I returned to my dwelling, sat under that lamp where I always performed my stitching, and spread out before me that small piece of muscle tissue I had taken from that person—about the size of a small child's fist. It looked no different from rabbit meat. Or lamb, or beef. Red, fibrous, carrying a faint scent of blood. If you saw it at the market, you wouldn't give it a second glance. You would assume it was just a scrap of meat from some animal, perhaps suitable for a stew or meatballs.

I chose the abdomen as the site for implantation. The skin there has sufficient elasticity, there is enough space underneath, and it is close to the centre of the body—the place where I always felt the hole was deepest. I had already marked the spot and disinfected it with iodine. The entire process took less than twenty minutes. Technically, it was no different from the dozens of experiments I had performed with animal flesh. The same movements, the same stitching, the same finishing touches. But when the final stitch was tied, when I covered the new wound with gauze, when I set down my instruments and leaned back in my chair—

Something happened that language cannot describe. Or rather, language can only offer a clumsy approximation. Let me try: Imagine you have lived your entire life in a colourless world. Not blind—you can see light and shadow, shapes and outlines, distinguish brightness and darkness—but you have never known what "red" is, what "blue" is, what "golden sunlight" or "green leaves" are. You think the world is simply like this. You think everyone sees the same as you. You think the words describing colour are merely poetic metaphors, a pretence everyone tacitly agrees to. Then suddenly, without warning, you see red. It is not the red of your imagination—imagination requires a prototype, and you have none. It is Red itself. It strikes your retina directly, slams into your visual cortex, bypassing all concepts and language and intermediaries, presenting itself to you as a pure texture. This shock redefines your entire understanding of "seeing". It makes you realise you have never truly seen anything before.

My body felt an anchoring heaviness, like it finally possessed ballast. The stitched site on my abdomen throbbed dully, and this pain told me: I am here. I am real. There is something beneath my skin, and that thing makes me, me.

I do not know how long I lay there. Time became unreliable that night, like heated plastic—warping, stretching, losing its original shape. Perhaps minutes. Perhaps hours. I felt myself sinking, passing through the mattress, through the floorboards, through the soil and rock strata, sinking all the way down to some warm, dark, primordial place. The sensation was more like—

Going home.

No, deeper than home. Going home is merely returning to a place you once left. This was returning to a place you had never truly left—you had simply forgotten its existence, forgotten it was once your entire world, forgotten that before you became "you", you lived there.

Let me be more precise—do you remember the womb?

Of course you don't. No one remembers. That is a matter before language, before memory, before the self. But your body remembers. Every cell in your body remembers. That sensation of being completely enveloped. That sensation of being suspended in warm fluid, needing no breath because oxygen is delivered directly to you through the blood. That sensation of having no boundaries—you do not know where you end and where the mother begins, because at that stage, such a distinction is meaningless. You are her. She is you. You are two parts of the same circulatory system, two stretches of the same river.

The heartbeat—the first sound you ever heard was not your own, but hers. That colossal, rhythmic sound coming from all directions, the background music of your entire universe. It said: You are safe. You are contained. You need not do anything, need not be anyone, you need only be here, floating in this warm darkness, and everything will be taken care of.

Then you were born. You were pushed out of that warm cavity, into a cold, blinding, noisy world. Someone cut the cord that connected you to her. From that moment on, you were alone. From that moment on, you began to lack. You began to hunger, to freeze, to need, to crave, to demand from the outside everything you once possessed automatically. You spend an entire lifetime searching for all manner of things to fill the place where you were cut, but nothing truly works, because nothing can replace that—that total, unconditional fusion that precedes all contracts and exchanges.

That night, as I lay in bed feeling the weight of that tiny piece of the Other within me, I touched the edge of that sensation for the first time—the first time since leaving the womb. As that tissue belonging to another settled within me, as my body began to accept it, wrap around it, treat it as part of itself, I felt the softening of boundaries. The line between "Me" and "Not-Me"—that line drawn so crudely at birth—began to blur. My interior held an Other. The Other was within me, and I was expanded because of it.

This was what I had been searching for all along. Love, understanding, connection—none of these—those words are too socialised, too dependent on the interaction between two separate subjects. What I sought was something more primitive: Fusion. True, material, irrevocable fusion.

Amniotic fluid flowed from my eyes—warm, salty. I closed them, feeling myself shrinking, curling, returning to that initial posture—knees against chest, arms hugging myself, spine curved into a perfect C. I pulled the duvet over my head, wrapping myself in a cocoon. The weight of the duvet pressed upon me, like a layer of warm liquid, like a pair of giant, invisible hands.

You are here. You are held. You need not drift anymore.

To date, I have sutured forty-eight people into my body. I know this sounds impossible. The human body contains so many bones, so many organs, so much tissue; how could it be possible to fit the entirety of forty-eight people into one frame? It is a legitimate query, a question of physics. But you must understand, this undertaking has consumed nearly thirty years. From the first to the forty-eighth, it has spanned the longest journey of my life. During these three decades, I have constantly learned, experimented, refined, and optimised. I learned how to handle different types of tissue, how to preserve them, how to fuse them with my own body in the most effective manner. I learned which parts were best suited to receive which materials, learned where the body’s load-bearing limits lay, and how to push those limits, inch by inch.

The early attempts were crude. I took only a small piece—a section of muscle tissue roughly the size of an infant’s fist—because I did not know if more was possible, did not know how the body would react, did not know where that invisible line was drawn. But as time passed, as experience accumulated, I grew increasingly ambitious. One fist became two, became an entire muscle group, became bone, fascia, skin, fat—everything that could be assimilated. This act was conducted in batches, in phases, like an engineering project spanning decades. Every surgery required a recovery period, required the body to adapt to the new weight, the new density, the new composition. There were times of complication—infection, rejection, cases where I had to excise and begin anew. But I persevered.

Thirty years. Forty-eight people. Now, they are all inside me. My body is no longer the body it was. If you were to see me on the street, you might think me a little odd—my proportions not quite right, my silhouette a touch unnatural, my gait possessing an unspeakable heaviness. But you would not guess the truth. No one would guess the truth. The truth is too outlandish; so outlandish that it serves as its own best protection.

I can feel them. Not in any mystical sense—I do not believe the soul continues to exist after the death of the flesh, nor do I believe consciousness can operate independently of the brain. My meaning is simpler, and far more material: I can feel that the density of my body has altered. When I lie down, I feel gravity pressing me more firmly against the bed. I am no longer a drifting spectre, a silhouette that might be blown away by the wind at any moment. I have weight. I have texture. I have content.

Sometimes, in the dead of night, I press my hands against my own body—abdomen, chest cavity, limbs, every location where I know something is buried—and imagine who lies beneath the skin. The one who slept in the park. The one who missed the last bus. The one walking alone on a rainy night. The one who drank in the pub until closing time. The one who had just broken up with a lover and was walking by the river, weeping. The one who worked overtime until dawn, too exhausted to keep their eyes open. And now they are all within me. Their atoms are mixed with mine, their molecules entangled with mine, their existence fused with my own. When I breathe, forty-nine people breathe. When my heart beats, the histories of forty-nine people pulse.

I make no effort to learn their names. I never ask for their stories. This is a wilful ignorance, a necessary distance. Once I begin to treat them as specific individuals—with parents, friends, lovers, unfinished plans and unrealised dreams—my relationship with them changes. They transform from Material into People, and I transform from an experimenter into a murderer.

Language possesses such power. It can turn the same act into art or crime, depending on which set of vocabulary you employ.

I write this not as an act of repentance. Repentance presupposes sin, and sin presupposes a moral code I must obey. But I ceased believing in such laws long ago—not because I intentionally rebelled against them, but because I never truly felt their authority. When people say "Thou shalt not kill," I understand the grammatical structure of the sentence, I understand its function in the social contract, I even understand its origin in evolutionary psychology—a group that prohibits internal killing survives better than one that allows it, and so this rule is written into our cultural genes. But I have never felt its power as an internal imperative. Like a person born with congenital analgesia—he can understand the concept that "pain is bad," he can learn to avoid actions that cause tissue damage, but he can never experience pain itself.

This is not a boast, nor is it a defence. It is simply a fact. I am a statistical anomaly, a bug in the evolutionary sense, a specimen whose moral neurons did not develop according to the standard configuration. If you wish, you may classify me as a psychopath, or as having Antisocial Personality Disorder, or whatever label you can find in the DSM-5. But these labels are just another form of evasion—they allow you to put me in a box, close the lid, and pretend the problem is solved.

Look, here is a monster, a psychopath, a specimen that needs to be isolated and studied.

You use these words to protect yourselves, to draw a clear line between you and me. We are normal, they are abnormal. Our desires are healthy, theirs are pathological. We seek satisfaction within the boundaries of society, they cross that uncrossable line. Therefore, what they do has nothing to do with us, and their existence cannot question any of the assumptions upon which we rely for survival.

But the real question is: if a person is born without an intrinsic moral sense, are they obliged to submit to external moral laws?

Let me expand on this question, expand it until you feel uncomfortable. The moral sense—by which I mean that internal, spontaneous intuition of "right" and "wrong" that need not be taught—is said to be innate to humanity. Evolutionary psychologists will tell you it is the product of natural selection: individuals capable of cooperation, capable of following rules, capable of suppressing short-term impulses for long-term gain, were more likely to survive and reproduce. Thus, after millions of years of sifting, the moral sense, like upright walking and symmetrical faces, was etched into our genes.

But genes are not laws; genes are merely probabilities. In any normal distribution, there are margins. There are individuals who deviate from the mean by two, three, four standard deviations. Some are born two feet shorter than average, some are born unable to distinguish red from green, and some are born lacking the neural circuitry that makes most people automatically feel that "killing is wrong." I am that margin. I am not using this to absolve myself. I am perfectly aware that in any functioning society, what I do is defined as a crime, to be investigated and punished. That is not the issue. The issue is: what is the basis for this definition, this investigation, this punishment?

If you say: the basis is the Social Contract. We reached an agreement that to survive together, everyone relinquishes a portion of their freedom, including the freedom to harm others. But the Social Contract is a metaphor, not a fact. No one ever actually signed this contract. When you were born, no one placed a document before you saying, "Please read the terms and sign." You are presumed to have consented, simply because you were born into this society. What kind of consent is that? A consent you have no capacity to refuse. A consent imposed upon you before you were capable of thought.

If you say: the basis is Natural Law. Some things are intrinsically wrong, regardless of social contracts, regardless of humans, regardless of which corner of the universe. Killing is wrong, just as two plus two equals four; it is an objective truth transcending culture.

—But tell me, where is this "intrinsic wrongness" inscribed? Is it etched in atoms? In physical laws? If the sun explodes tomorrow, the earth vanishes, and all humans go extinct, will the proposition "killing is wrong" still exist? Or will it dissipate along with the last brain capable of thinking it?

Morality does not reside in matter. Morality resides in ideas about matter. And ideas exist only where there are minds to think them.

Taking it a step further, if morality is merely a social construct—a set of rules accepted by the majority in this specific historical period and geographical location—then what does the existence of those on the statistical fringe, those born unconvinced by these rules, signify? Are they errors? Glitches to be patched? Viruses to be isolated and destroyed? —Or are they simply different? Just as left-handers are "different" in a world designed for right-handers, just as the colour-blind are "different" in a world full of traffic lights. Not inferior in a moral sense, merely rare in a statistical one.

I know you dislike this comparison. I know you will say: left-handers do not harm others, the colour-blind do not harm others, but you harmed others, so you cannot use "difference" to defend yourself.

But doesn't the concept of "harm" itself presuppose a system of values?

I harmed them. Yes. I ended their lives—or more accurately, I ended one specific form of their lives, whilst continuing another form within my own body. But the word "harm" implies I did something that should not have been done. And where do those words "should not" come from? From God? From Nature? From that Social Contract of yours that no one signed?

If you say the harm lies in my depriving them of their future, depriving them of potential experiences, potential potential, love they might have given and received—then let me ask you: what ontological status do these "potentials" hold before they become "reality"? What is the difference between a future that never happened and a fictional character that never existed? Do you grieve for the "deprived future" of a novel character who was never written?

I am not engaging in sophistry. I am asking in earnest. I am taking those premises you have never questioned out into the light, so you can see what material they are made of. Spoiler alert: it is language. It is consensus. It is the line where everyone agreed to stop asking questions.

You must understand, I am not asking if there is a correct answer to this question. Perhaps there is—perhaps Kant’s categorical imperative is right, perhaps the utilitarian greatest happiness principle is right. Perhaps at some philosophical altitude I cannot reach, there exists a perfect, self-consistent ethical system that answers all these questions. All of this is possible.

But that is not what I am asking. I am asking: have you ever seriously thought about it? Have you ever, on those sleepless nights, as you lie in the darkness listening to your own heartbeat, listening to the wind or cars or the silence of nothing at all—in those moments, when the shadow of Toska creeps silently across the foot of your bed, have you ever suspected: Maybe those rules are just a collective pretence.

Maybe we all know they are hollow. Maybe everyone has seen through it all at some instant at three in the morning—seen through the charade of morality, seen through meaning, seen through the entire intricate costume of society and law and human relationships. Maybe everyone has had that moment where everything collapses, revealing the void beneath, a void exactly like the hole inside me.

But you pretend not to see it. You turn over, tell yourself it’s just insomnia, just too much stress, just a need to adjust your lifestyle. You get up the next morning, wash your face, brush your teeth, get dressed, walk out the door, and continue to play your role as a meaningful, purposeful, moral human being. You lock that 3 a.m. moment away in a deep drawer, lock it with the key called "Normal Life", and pretend that drawer does not exist.

That is your choice. I do not judge. Everyone has the right to choose their own anaesthetic. But—

Please do not pretend that drawer does not exist. Please do not stand on your artificially constructed moral high ground and point fingers at me, as if there is an essential, unbridgeable chasm between us. The only thing separating us is a choice: to face that void, or to pretend it isn't there. I chose to face it. You chose to pretend.

Who is the more honest?

Sometimes, deep in the night, in those hours when the city has finally fallen silent, I imagine your reaction as you read this confession.

Most of you will feel revulsion. This is the most predictable, the most instinctual reaction, the one requiring the least thought. Your skin will crawl with gooseflesh—that is the contraction of the arrector pili muscles, a defence mechanism you possessed when you were still apes. Your stomach will tighten, you will feel the urge to vomit; that is your body rejecting information marked as 'toxic'. Your amygdala will sound the alarm, adrenaline will be released, your heart rate will accelerate, your pupils will dilate—fight or flight, the standard procedure for mammals facing danger.

You will want to tear this page to shreds. Or switch off the screen. Or throw this document into the fireplace and watch it burn, watch my words turn to ash and rising heat, dissipating, vanishing, as if they had never existed. This is your body protecting you. This is the defence system evolution spent millions of years building for you. It erects a barrier between you and me, a wall built of hormones and neurotransmitters. It says: Danger. Keep away. This is not your kind. This is a predator. This is a pathogen. Do not let it near.

This barrier is useful. From the perspective of species survival, it is necessary. But it is also a blindfold. It obscures what you ought to see.

After revulsion comes anger; this is almost inevitable. Anger is a more advanced emotion; it requires an object, something to be blamed, something to be punished. Revulsion is merely rejection; anger is a counter-attack.

You will think of those people. My Material. You will construct stories for them in your minds—I gave them no stories, so you will provide them yourselves. You will imagine their faces, their names, their birthdays, their favourite foods and their greatest fears. You will imagine their families: mothers waiting by the door, fathers sitting by the window, siblings unable to sleep, lovers waking in the night reaching out to touch an empty bed. You will think of the vacancies left behind. The empty chair at the Christmas dinner table. The seat left unoccupied at a graduation ceremony. The human-shaped blank space cropped out of group photos. The birthday wishes that no longer ring out, the phone number that will never again be answered, the doorbell ringing only to reveal someone else, always someone else, never them again.

These imaginings will ignite your fury. You will want justice—but let us be honest with one another, let us maintain an uncomfortable candour within the context of this confession—what you truly want is not justice, but vengeance. Justice is a concept in judicial robes; it demands procedure, evidence, proportionality. Vengeance is something more primitive; it demands blood, it demands pain, it demands that the one who caused harm suffers equal or greater harm. You call it 'justice' because the word 'vengeance' is not respectable enough, because saying "I want that person to suffer" makes you uncomfortable when you look in the mirror.

I understand this anger. I even respect it. It proves you still care. That there is still something capable of rousing you from numbness, making you truly feel something. That in itself is precious.

But—beneath the revulsion and the anger—beneath all these loud, socially sanctioned emotions that can be safely expressed—I suspect there is a third thing. Something quieter, more secretive, something you are unwilling to admit or perhaps even unwilling to realise.

Curiosity.

You want to know what it feels like. But I do not mean the sensation of killing—that is too crude, too Hollywood, too easily reduced to something primal and violent that can be labelled 'psychopathic' and filed away.

What you want to know is the sensation of filling. That feeling of finally touching something solid. That feeling of having a landing site after a lifetime of drifting. You want to know: when I lay in bed after those surgeries, feeling the added weight within me, feeling the expansion of boundaries and the increase in density, feeling that hole which had been screaming all this time finally, finally, finally shut its mouth—in those moments, did I finally obtain the thing you have spent your entire lives searching for?

The answer is: yes and no. Yes, because every fusion brought a genuine, undeniable sense of wholeness that nothing else could replace. When the new tissue settled within me, when my immune system accepted it, when my blood vessels began to supply it, when my nerves began to incorporate it into my map of proprioception—there was indeed a moment. A fleeting, near-sacred moment I would almost call a miracle.

In that moment, everything stood still. The noise of the external world became distant, like a blurred background heard through thick glass. My own thoughts fell silent, ceasing their endless, exhausting chatter. The hole—that hole I had tracked all my life, spent a lifetime feeding, understanding, fighting—stopped its screaming. It let out a satisfied sigh, like an infant finally fed, and sank into a peace so profound it was almost vegetative.

No, because it never lasted. The wholeness receded. Like a tide, it came, stayed a while, then retreated, revealing the forever-dry sand beneath. The void returned. First a thread of unease, then a familiar emptiness, and then the hole I thought filled began to grow again, hunger again, scream again. And every time it returned, it was more intense, because it had tasted satisfaction. A hole that has never been fed is a norm, a background noise that can be endured. But a hole that has been fed and then goes hungry is a torture.

I became Sisyphus. Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy. He said Sisyphus found some meaning, or the dignity of rebelling against the absurd, in the process of pushing the rock up the mountain and watching it roll down, time and again. It is a beautiful idea. It is an idea that allows one to continue living in despair.

But what Camus did not say is this: Sisyphus’s hands would develop calluses. Sisyphus’s back would bow from the daily burden. Sisyphus’s knees would begin to ache, his muscles atrophy, his eyes lose focus from staring at the same rock for too long. Happiness—if it can indeed be called happiness—comes at a price. Rebelling against the absurd comes at a price.

Every filling made me realise more clearly: this hole has no bottom. Or rather—let me push this thought to its logical terminus, to that suffocating place—the hole is the bottom. It is not a flaw in existence, not a bug to be fixed, not a pit that can be levelled if one is lucky or works hard enough. It is existence. It is the innate structure of consciousness itself, the bone within the bone, the wound within the wound. It is the primordial crack that allows the "I" to separate from the "Not-I"—without that crack, there is no separation; without separation, there is no "I"; without the "I", there is no one here to think any of this.

Without that hole, there is no Me.

The infant in the womb possesses no Me. Because the infant and the mother are one, two parts of the same circulatory system, the upstream and downstream of the same river of blood. There is no hunger, for nutrition is delivered directly through the umbilical cord. There is no cold, for the temperature is constant at thirty-seven degrees. There is no fear, for fear requires a "self" that can be threatened, and at that time, there is no "self". Only floating. Only the heartbeat—not one’s own, but the mother’s, that colossal, all-encompassing heartbeat, the background music of the universe.

The I appears only at birth. At the moment the cord is cut. At the moment the infant takes its first breath of air with its own lungs—that first mouthful of air is icy, stinging, utterly alien. At the moment its skin is exposed to air rather than amniotic fluid. At the moment it opens its eyes, scorched by light, drowned by sound, struck by this vast, noisy world that is no longer the mother.

At the moment it suddenly realises—no, at the moment its body is suddenly forced to realise—that there is a Here and a There. There is a Me and a Not-Me. There is a border, a freshly drawn, bleeding border, cutting it out from that warm whole, turning it into an isolated, shivering fragment that must henceforth face everything alone. That separation is the origin of the hole. That cry—the first cry at birth—is not joy, not a celebration of life. It is mourning; it is a scream of loss. It is the first protest of a life just expelled from Eden: Why? Why pull me out of there? Why cut that cord? Why make me become "Me"?

We all forget that scream. We must forget, or we could not survive. But our bodies remember. Every moment, they remind us: You were once whole, you were once held, you once did not need to bear the weight of existence alone. And now you must. And now you forever must. And that wholeness will never return.

I am a wound.

And self-awareness is a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—the PTSD of that separation. We spend a lifetime treating a wound that will never heal, using love, achievement, faith, material goods, any bandage that might temporarily staunch the bleeding. But the wound will not heal, and cannot heal. Because if that crack closed, if the border between "I" and "Not-I" vanished—we would cease to exist. We would revert to that thing with no consciousness, no boundaries, no "Me".

This is Toska—the untranslatable word, the incurable disease, the unhealable wound. It is the price of existence, the rent that consciousness must pay.

Nabokov said that at its lowest level it is ennui, boredom. He said at its middle level it is longing, nostalgia, a pining for someone or something. He said at its highest level—the deepest, most painful level—it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause.

But what he did not say is this: above that highest level, there is another layer, one perhaps he did not touch, or dared not touch. At that layer, Toska is no longer an emotion. It becomes a cognition. A lucid, inescapable realisation that makes one want to scream: This is the essence of existence. This is the cost of consciousness. This is the weight of the word "I". You are not feeling emptiness—you are emptiness, a temporarily inflated void, a void pretending to be solid. And those things you use to fill yourself—love, achievement, meaning, flesh and blood—they are not making you whole; they are merely maintaining the pretence, merely constantly inflating the balloon so it does not deflate in plain sight.

This is where I have arrived. This is where my Toska has taken me. I cut my skin with a knife. I sew the flesh of others into my body with needle and thread. I have done all these things called madness, called perversion, called evil. But I am not mad. I am simply lucid. I have simply stopped pretending. I am simply responding in my own way to the question everyone is answering, but most pretend not to hear: How do you fill a hole with no bottom?

The answer is: You cannot fill it. You can only keep throwing things into it, watching them vanish into the dark, and keep throwing, keep throwing, until you throw yourself in too.

This is living. This is the whole meaning of being an "I". This is Toska.