I am Derek Lee

I’m Derek Lee, and let’s run it back a little.

I’m an unstitcher. I hunt people for their stitches. That usually means killing them.

I don’t do self reflection.

You know who does self reflection?

Artists.

You know, the homeless people on the street. The people in the cardboard boxes. It’s dumb to reflect on yourself, because when you do end up doing it, you’re gonna end up jumping into a whole new rabbit hole, and that rabbit hole’s going to lead you careening into an art degree. From there it’s going to be songs, prose, or—god forbid—poetry. And none of those things get you money these days. I don’t think it ever did.

I can’t make shitty abstract paintings with the same hands that kill people, okay? It’s one or the other, never both, or else you’re a psychopathic serial killer who paints with intestines and blood or some shit.

But here’s the thing, and I’m a little upset about admitting this. Ever since they took me—some delivery boy for Pizza Hut or Dominos or whatever pizza joint was cool five years ago—I’ve been split into two.

Not literally. Or at least, not yet. But there’s two parts of me: the guy who got left delivering pizzas, and the guy who kills people for a living.

This isn’t some cheesy shit about how I left behind a boy to become a man. I don’t think anyone leaves themselves behind when things change for the worse, or for the better. And I didn’t choose to start killing; they did. The wasteful theys.

The only ones who don’t have to live their lives being reminded that they’re just cogs in a gear machine.

One day, they decided they had enough. They spiked my pizza with a killswitch, and the moment I delivered my pizza my customer was dead on his doorstep. I later learned that my customer was a part of some kind of crime syndicate responsible for selling these things, these elusive stitches. What the fuck were they?

The details don’t matter. All that matters is that some fatass CEO wanted this guy dead, and now it looked like I was the killer. I went through years of proxies and lawyers and legal jargon and loopholes just to get myself a lighter sentence. I still got ten years. Do you know what ten years in an isolation headset feels like?

Ten years of thinking, ten fucking years of thinking. And I didn’t come out of it an artist, I came out of it a killer.

The boy sitting inside me has been charred black by vengeance. It’s all he fucking wants, and it’s unfathomably annoying. I used to think he was going to be the new me, but here’s the truth: you get traumatised because some rich guys were mean to you, you grow hateful, and then you’ve got to reintegrate yourself back into society somehow, because how else are you going to get your revenge? The new part of me knows; he keeps the old me at bay.

The moment I see my own face—boyish, untamed, clean—on my mark’s greasy ass head, I have to fight myself. I know what this means. I know who Supersession69 really is. I know who fucking did this.

Because you don’t become a monster. You grow new skin over your old self, turn it into a weapon, disguise it like camouflage. You talk louder than the thoughts that give you away.

And sometimes, the armour falls apart.