by


Confession of a Suspicious Mind
(Short Story)

I am always suspicious, just like you, eyeing every move and analyzing every word that comes from a person’s mouth. Afraid of what they tell me, I always make sure to hear everything they talk about. Even their gestures are no exception. They are all subjects to my keen eyes. Taking heed on my surrounding is what I always do. Yes, it needs a lot of work to do, but for 10 years of living as such, it becomes my habit.

When I was child, my patrons never missed a day to bully me.  It seemed it became their usually routine, an ingredient to call their day complete. There was a time when I was just walking to home from school. A gang of teenagers older than I am threw me in a trash bin, head first. That day, I went home with plastics still stuck in my shirt. My mom was not home yet. She was at her work, making sure that at the end of the month we have food to eat. I don’t have someone to talk to every time I was bullied. A coincidence, I barely knew. It just happened.
In the end, I chose to conceal it.
Gone are the days when I live peacefully. Anywhere I go, everywhere I go, it happens. These made me lose my confidence, made me think that no one will ever accept who I am. My skin is full of scars. Even my face has a mark, a long stretching embossed line from my left eye to cheek.  It is the proof of the beatings I received from my father. He died from throat cancer. Karma, itself, saved me from his cruel hands. But karma never even thought of the future villains of my life. After that I convinced myself to take revenge using my own hands.
My mother mourned for months. She did not left the bedroom, so I was left alone doing what a mother should do. With no friends or siblings or relatives, I am always left alone. No one knew how I think or how I react to certain things. I’m just quiet like a mute child, but they did not know how my eyes sparkle when I started to think how to make them suffer. The funny thing when I took my revenge, they never knew even a slightest chance that it is I who inflict damage to their life. So when someone conspicuously did something to me, expect my revenge with no chance of achieving justice at all.
Their stare itself tells me how guilty they are, their jaws that clenched every time they lie or use me as an absorber of their anger or issues in life. The words they use, its intonation and the topic they discuss, it becomes my basis that they are an addition to my list of villains – my evidence that they are wicked like the persons I made suffer before. I did it for justice per se.
I am always suspicious. It’s the reason I even stayed at night to watch their every move and every words they speak. I am a guardian that makes them feel to always watch out and never commit any mistake.
I am not the only who have the same skill, which becomes a part of my nature. There are millions of us out there who haven’t yet discovered their unique talent, or haven’t met someone like them, or do not have the confidence to place justice in their own hands.  I am not the only one. I am not the worst, but I am not also the best.

I’m just an observer, a spectator, a bystander or whatever you call it. I’ll let karma finish what I started. Remember that I only watch even though they scream for help or plead to save them. I’m just a spectator who loves to find suspicious persons with apprehensive actions, like the villain that scarred me when I was young. I’m just an observer, a spectator, a bystander or whatever you call it. I did it for justice per se.