text: I never listened. Throughout my childhood I was troubled--I let darkness consume me. I never listened to others, I never heard them. There was no right or wrong, there was only what I felt. It was before psychopathic corrective therapy was invented. It was before the United States implemented background checks for buying assault rifles. I had problems, but I saw myself as the hero of my own story. One day in high school, I decided to end it, and I was going to bring everyone down with me. Back then, death was exciting to me. It was a way out of my shitty existence, a way to escape the daily beatings of my father and brothers. On my eighteenth birthday, I bought an AR-15 with all the money I had saved up working at a gas station. I took it out into the woods to practice my aim. I hunted for deer. I found joy in bringing death upon beautiful living creatures. I became addicted to that feeling. After a month of practicing, I was ready. I burst into the school and started shooting everyone I could find. I took joy in their screams of pain. I toyed with them, made them beg even though I would kill them anyway. I reveled in the sight of the blood and destruction I caused before me. I killed twelve people that day. Teachers, students, a janitor, boys, girls, it didn't matter. I killed indiscriminately and with great enthusiasm. When the police finally arrived and I was backed into a corner, I took my father's handgun that I had stolen and stuck it in my mouth. As the sirens blared outside and the police pounded on the door of the classroom I was holed up in, I pulled the trigger. I felt the bullet pass right through the roof of my mouth. Immense pain radiated from the exit wound at the top of my head. I fell back and saw my blood scattered over the ceiling. But somehow, I was still alive. The police burst into the room, guns drawn, donned in S.W.A.T. gear. They saw me, eyes wide open, in shock on the floor. I was covered in blood but I was still alive. As they carried me out, I saw the carnage I had wrought over this school and I still felt no remorse, just pride. *I made this.* Doctors could not explain how I survived my gunshot wound. In the press, I became both a notorious monster and a medical marvel. My trial was swift. I watched the testimony of crying family and friends of the victims I had killed and felt no remorse. The only emotion I felt was confusion. *How am I still here? Why am I not dead?* After being convicted for all twelve counts of murder, I was sentenced to twelve consecutive life sentences, without the possibility of parole. While in prison, I attempted suicide fifteen times. First, I tried hanging. No luck. I must have done something wrong because I could breathe easily the whole time. Then I tried slitting my wrists. I didn't lose enough blood before my wounds healed. I even tried a brazen escape where I was shot multiple times. I was incapacitated and returned to a new, fortified cell. Any wounds I suffered healed remarkably fast. The self-inflicted gunshot wound, slitting my wrists, the gunshot wounds from the guards left no scars. I was invincible, but not strong. I felt excruciating pain with every wound I suffered. I was easily overtaken by guards with each escape attempt. When I turned fifty years old in a supermax on a rural plain somewhere in the midwest, it was clear that I was not aging. I looked the same as I did on my eighteenth birthday. Prison doctors and researchers studied me relentlessly over the years. They treated me like a lab rat. I suppose they felt I deserved it, knowing what I had done. At age one hundred and ten, it was clear I couldn't die. At age two hundred they tried to give me a death sentence, even though by then, capital punishment was no longer legal. But they made an exception in my case, and no one in the legal system fought it. I was injected with a lethal cocktail and I immediately fell asleep. But once again, I did not die. I woke up in my cell a week later. The prison put out a press release saying that I had died but they kept my being alive a secret. Panic would set in among the populace knowing that there was an immortal mass murderer in the prison system. After another failed lethal injection, I was studied ruthlessly. I was poked and prodded, put through immense pain, all so the researchers and doctors could find out why I could not die. All the while, I felt no remorse for the lives I took that day. I still felt I would do it again if given the change. In my over two hundred years of life, I still felt the urge to kill, but I knew I never would be able to fulfill that desire. It was maddening, I had this urge to kill or die, but I couldn’t kill and I couldn’t die! So I sat in my cell and relived that day I killed over and over in my head. It made me feel powerful, it made me feel free. Each re-imagining of the killing gave me a sick, orgasmic bliss. When I turned eight hundred and eighty seven years old, the doctors tried a new experimental treatment that intended to cure psychopathy. It involved drilling a small hole into my frontal cortex and injecting cerebral stem cells from a non-psychopathic donor. When I regained consciousness, I saw the world anew. I had a feeling that I had never experienced before--empathy. For the first time I could imagine what it was like to be someone else. When I read books, I could feel the emotions of the characters. I could connect to the experiences in movies I saw. After more evaluation, they determined I was no longer clinically a psychopath. Then they showed me the news footage from my shooting rampage. It felt as if the cell spun around me as I saw the grieving friends and family give their reports of what I had done. I vomited when I saw the video of a grieving mother shouting at me in court. I took her son away, I understood that now. I felt her pain. I took took twelve sons and daughters away too soon. I thought of that day again, as I had done before the treatment. But now, there was no feeling of power, no pleasure in the violence. I felt nothing but abject horror over what I had done. The thought of each person begging for their lives filled me with regret. I couldn't live with myself knowing what I had done. For the first time in my life, I cried. I cried like a newborn, fresh from the womb. Finally, I understood the horrors that this world can bestow upon the innocent--and I understood my part in it. I wanted to go back and save those people. I wanted to take back what I had done, but I couldn't. Everyone they knew and loved were long gone. But I still lived on, carrying the pain now, probably forever. In past suicide attempts, I tried due to boredom, just not wanting to stay in this gray cell block for the rest of my life. Now I know that I could possibly live for all eternity. Every day, I relive what I did on loop and I feel enough sorrow to make up for that which I did not feel for the past eight hundred years. When my sentence was technically up, I was denied parole. The board said they could never take the chance releasing an immortal killer to the public, no matter how much remorse I felt. The researchers stopped their experiments on me once they saw that I now had compassion. They couldn't bear to put me through pain anymore. So now, everyday, I sit in my cell, and think about what I had done. Everyday, I decide I can't live with myself. Everyday, I try to kill myself again just to end this pain, this grave remorse that wracks my soul. Everyday, I fail. If this wasn’t hell, I couldn’t tell you the difference.