The Paradoxical Hug

Warning: The following story is a fictional story on the horrifying experiences of young children that take place during Human Trafficking. It contains suggestions of sexual violence, drug abuse, death, and even suicide. This story was made to remind us about what humanity needs to do to save our children.

Today, I marked my 17th birthday and the day of my last breath, which I had come long for. The air reeked of urine, sweat, and blood—an odour that had become a habitual part of my life. As I awoke from my cot, my thoughts swirled, attempting to piece together the fragments of my life to hold onto them like precious relics before the darkness took over completely. However, my mind was a haze, and the memories slipped through my fingers, like grains of sand. The drugs I had ingested with my meagre meal the previous night were taking their toll, distorting my perceptions, and tethering me to a disorienting reality.

The girl whose story I am narrating is Sylvia Vanderbilt, a name etched into the fibres of my dying identity. I was born on January 7, 2005, and today, I sit here, composing the chronicle of my death. I understand the confusion, but this story is a paradox I embody: both the protagonist and storyteller, living and dying simultaneously. I have crossed into the space between life and what lies beyond, allowing me to tell this story while waiting for the transition into the afterlife. The boundaries of time and perspective have dissolved, granting me this unique vantage point of an author who exists on the cusp of the two worlds. Writing this at this moment is a testament to my love for paradoxes both on Earth and in this moment where I sit awaiting death.

I was born into a family with two siblings and parents who prioritized their work and bank accounts over their children. This lack of attention led to my fascination with the world of art, a feeble attempt to create images of life that I craved. My love for literature also began young. Literature opened doors to worlds beyond the physical and the reality. It was on those pages that I found my most authentic self, merging the lines between reality and fiction, much like the paradoxes that fascinated me. I had previously thought that the haven of peace created by the combination of art and literature was sufficient, but I was mistaken. I chose to write this story on the precipice of life and death, not as a farewell but as a testament to the enduring connection between existence and the unknown. In my musings on paradoxes, I found myself drawn to the greatest enigma of all, the nature of divinity. Since the beginning of time, the human mind has been strained against the vastness of the divine, and attempts have been made to encapsulate the incomprehensible but proving futile. My parents' biggest mistake was to define their world in black and white, the divine danced in the spaces between, forever writing the wrong acts they performed, slipping away from the grips of humanity.

In my pursuit of meaning that I thought I could find in literature, it arrived in an ugly place—the dimly lit basement that I was trapped in. I often wondered why I paid for my parents' karmic retribution, but I had forgotten about the selfish behaviours I had exhibited in my whole life. Nevertheless, how had I ended up in the depths of an inhumane basement surrounded by kids being sold into the black market every day? Following a long-awaited court battle against my parent company in 2012, they were charged with financial fraud and laundering money for 25 years in prison. Soon after, I was taken away by the cops only to wake up two nights later in this basement, sold to the inhumane. The only possible conclusion to my damnation simply goes to a rival company whose evil knows no bounds.

In the beginning, the drugs I had ingested left me disoriented, my surroundings a swirling haze. As night descended, the grip of the drugs lessened, and my mind's desperate attempts to escape the reality of the basement had me craving drugs. In the moments when I gained a grip on myself, I worried about my siblings knowing that they must have met the same fate and silently prayed for their easy ending. At these moments, I unleashed wrath upon my birth givers, who had sent me here and who had pre-ordained my torture for the small amount of money that they had incurred and clearly lost today. The nights blended into an indistinct succession, as those who held me captive unleashed their pent-up frustrations, anger, lust, and loathing upon my 16-year-old body. My sense of purpose eroded and I found myself yearning for the sweet release of death, a reprieve from the unending nightmare. Whispers circulated, saying that at 17, our bodies were too old for any more lustful use. Supposedly, our young bodies would be dissected, our organs harvested, and our inside sold to those who saw worth in our remains. The notion offered perverse comfort—I mused that at least someone would benefit from this tainted heart of mine.

By the time my second week arrived, the days had morphed into a blurring of pain and despair. My body, once my own, became a canvas for the cruelty of those who revealed our suffering. Hunger gnawed at my inside, and my body was weakened by the meagre rations we were given. Amidst this bleak existence, one figure emerged: the woman with hollow eyes, the one counting the pieces of bread and, occasionally, tending to our needs. One fateful day, I mustered what remained my strength and locked my gaze on her. Her eyes were deep pits of darkness that seemed to hold secrets of their own shadows that matched the depth of my despair. With a voice laced with the tiniest glimmer of defiance, I demanded bread and braced myself for retribution, a lash of the tongue, or the sting of a slap. However, to my astonishment, she did not retaliate. Instead, with a motion that seemed both hesitant and rehearsed, she placed another piece of bread on my plate. As if sensing my desperate need, she also added a portion of rice; the grains promising a temporary respite from my gnawing hunger. My frail fingers clutched bread and rice as if they were treasures beyond measure. My body, starved and battered, consumed sustenance with a mixture of desperation and gratitude. For the first time, in what felt like an eternity, I experienced a glimmer of emotion. In that fleeting moment, as I chewed and swallowed, it was as if the woman's hollow eyes had seen me, acknowledged my existence, and recognized my suffering. The cruel irony was not lost on me; the same person who had briefly made me feel seen and valued was also the one orchestrating my sale, treating me as nothing more than a commodity. Delusions took root in my fractured mind: a conflicting blend of hope and despair. Even amid my delirium, I grasped the paradox—the paradox of finding a semblance of solace in the arms of the person responsible for my torment.

As I awoke on my final day, my body accorded a living testament to the ordeal. Bruises adorned my back, scars marked my arms, and my hand, fragile and broken, was cradled in a makeshift cloth. The little girl who had come in 3 weeks ago dead on her bed, let off an ugly stench. The sounds of the screams of children's nightmares filled the rooms, and those who dozed off drugs looked like soulless ghouls. Remembering the scene unfolding in front of me made me realize that death would not just be easy; it would be solace. I walked outside the room full of stench and looked at the woman in the eyes. If I wasn’t mistaken she seemed to look relieved knowing that I was about to be taken away from this Earth far into a world where no man could cast their shadow on me, or so I hoped. As I walked towards the man who was ready to take me to my final destination and the last place of my life as Sylvia Vanderbilt, I heard a noise. The tall chunky man and I turned around to see the woman inadvertently dropping a metal jug of water, whose noise interrupted the stillness of my mind. The man made some sort of sound, and we turned back on our heels, resuming our solemn marches. Suddenly, a voice distinctly and painfully calling my name delivered the reminder of Sylvia Vanderbilt, who I happily wanted to erase from life. I turned around to see a woman strutting towards me. She knelt down to me, and in an unexpected twist, embraced me in her arms. Perhaps the worst embrace I had ever experienced, but I felt the sincerity.

“You look just like my daughter,” the woman whispered into my ear.

I gazed into her dark holes and, to my surprise, I saw an ordinary mother worried about her child's thoughts, clouded by the haze of my torment, conjured an image of my mother— the one who had entangled me with these monsters. In my fantasy, I dared to envision that in my final moments, my mother would have sought to hold me close, just as this woman was doing now. I mustered the best smile I could because I knew just as I mourned my mother, she mourned her daughter. Our mismatched intentions gazed at each other and the moment felt peaceful. The emotion of some kind invigorated our eyes, and even though we longed for different people for that moment, we belonged to each other's emotions. Perhaps all my life has led to this very moment, my last moment, which managed to encapsulate the essence of all humanity. You see when the chasms of your soul can no longer howl in anger or sadness, when the spirit of the inner self can no longer look in the mirror, when the bloody hands and feet remind you of your immortality, it is only in these moments that humanity needs to stir from its slumber and recognize its power against all evil. The woman looked at me with tears in her eyes, threatening to fall. The man grabbed my hand, and my drug-induced brain carried a teary-striked image until the last moments of my death. There were countless faces I could have clung on to in these final moments, but even in my haze, I felt the longing of a mother for her daughter, albeit a fake one, had lulled me into the embrace of my death.

Waiting for the afterlife, I realized that the paradoxes that I had pondered on for my whole 17 years of life were finally disappearing. I had inhabited two worlds and yearned for humanity. I lived in the real world by immersing myself in the art of life while blurring lines with the dialogue of literature. In my books Mr. Darcy and Elizebeth belonged to each other, Harry Potter and his friends overcame Voldemort, and even in the Hunger Games, true love could absolve cruel leadership.

Yet, as the ink of my story continues to flow, in the precipice of death and life it becomes achingly clear that the real world holds its brand of darkness. In the realm of living, connections were traded and sold, and the warmth of human bonds was reduced to grim transactions. Our bodies, once vessels of life's potential, have become canvases for the embodiment of human cruelty. The colours of these evil abysses stretched beyond the limits of human imagination, and they could not be contained by the flames of hell alone. No, their sinister colours painted acts of evil that defied simple damnation. Throughout my life, I wandered on the periphery, a soul searching for a place to belong. The notion of belonging eluded me, leaving me adrift in a sea of disconnected experiences. Yet, on the day of my death, an unexpected twist of fate brought me into the grasp of being as cruel as any nightmare. In those final moments, an embrace—cruel and unfeeling, yet the only true embrace I had ever known—wrapped around me. It was a stark juxtaposition, a culmination of every paradox that I encountered.

Emotions surge within me: fear, sorrow, anger, and a profound sense of irony. How could it be that the pinnacle of the connection I had ever felt was in the arms of a tormentor, a bearer of unfathomable cruelty? This embrace was both the culmination of my suffering and the embodiment of the twisted reality I faced. It was a reflection of the broken world I had known, where pain and love were entwined in the most bewildering way. As I drifted from the realm of the living into the precipice, the emotions that had simmered throughout my life's journey came to a tumultuous boil. It is a symphony of sentiments—longing, regret, and confusion—each note echoing the complexities of my existence. The paradoxes that had once tormented me were dissolving and replaced by an understanding that transcended my mortal comprehension and mortality. This revelation, grand in its simplicity, holds the weight of an all-encompassing truth. No longer was it solely humanity seeking the divine; the divine itself travelled the depths of human existence, yearning to reunite with its goodness. It travels the alleys of sorrow and the avenues of joy, hoping to find a glimmer of its existence nestled within the hearts of the countless souls it created. This revelation represents a profound shift in perspective. Humanity, a species capable of the most heinous transgressions, was mirrored in the divine search. The divine, a force often deemed all-knowing, was in search of the pieces of its being scattered amidst the sea of human experiences. The yearning for humanity, the desire to belong, and the quest for meaning was the narrative of my story that found its conclusion in the most unexpected places—the embrace of a merciless being.

And so, as I fade away from the living world and become an inhabitant of the afterlife, I carry with me the clairvoyant emotions that have defined my journey. The colours of my experiences— vivid and sombre—blended into a canvas of memories, each stroke etched with the indelible ink of existence. The paradoxes have faded, but in their place remain a good soul—a soul that had yearned for connection amidst the chaos, a soul that had sought to reconcile the irreconcilable and a soul that had discovered an unexpected, agonizing embrace as its final moments.