‘What do you do for a living?’ was always a question that baffled me, as my desire to be honest with people, especially those who are close to me, always clashed with the fact they would never understand, and that’s how the whole ‘Contractor’ phase of my life began.

The answer was just vague and undefined enough that it kept my mind at ease, as I wasn’t technically lying, and it sure as hell was more understandable that ‘God-Catalysts’ or whatever dad liked to refer to us as.

Don’t get me wrong I love what I do, mostly, as I get to utilize the powers of many ‘mythological’ deities for good, yet, that came at a price, a hefty one, as for every good guy Thor you get to collaborate with, you get an Anubis, Cronus and Loki to deal with…

Loki, the so called, ‘sly one’, some part of me curses the day I first heard of that name, as not only it was always exhausting to come up with good deeds, masquerading as evil, for the idiot to accept, but also, he had the highest turnover rate among my portfolio that contained Koalemos for fuck’s sake!

Don’t believe me? Here’s how the past few hours went by… I woke up happy that it’s finally Friday, which meant in a few hours I got to kick back, relax and forget about my exhausting couple of weeks, I was hoping for a follow-up with Inanna, Freyja or even Hathor, but Nornir be damned, 8 am and It’s the Trickster on my doorstep yet again!!

To be continued… Or maybe not…

I’ve always known that my past actions would catch up to me one way or the other, I just assumed I would be killed in the battlefield, tortured maybe, not go through all that insane journey to be kidnapped over a decade later.

It all started last Tuesday when I was returning to my shithole of an apartment after yet another day of pretending to be somebody I’m not, I reached the corner-store well aware of some random car following me, yet I shrugged it off, ‘Meh, worst case scenario, I’ll have an excuse to beat someone down’, I thought to myself, next thing I know I’m here in this featureless cement cube with voices barking at me, telling me to share all the information I have on ‘M’, an old war-brother that I hadn’t communicated with in years…

A few hours in, and various attempts later to make me fess up, I realized, pacing around my cell, that my capturers knew almost nothing about me, other than my ties to M, as this wasn’t my first rodeo, not after being held captive multiple times during that god-forsaken war, not after that asylum, not after…

That’s when it hit me, it’s been ages since it was this quiet inside my head, it’s been ages since I’ve taken my last trip to that beautiful world I’ve constructed to escape all that surrounded me, it’s been eons since I’ve been with my real family, well, their ghosts at least…

A smile is suddenly painted on my face, as I sit down, crossing my legs beneath me, humming an old song about my city’s ruins, eyes wide shut as the light fills up every cell of my existence, I am finally home again…

To be continued… or maybe not…