Scars Without History

1. Daylight Misery

Every morning began the same way—with a gradual return to consciousness, accompanied by a relentless wave of dread. The weight of rejection felt suffocating, a heavy chain of inadequacies bound tightly around his chest. Each unanswered message, every subtle dismissal, echoed like silent screams, confirming the agonising truth he desperately wished to deny:

You are unwanted. You are inadequate.

But the ache wasn’t just loneliness. It was grief.

He had loved her. Fully, sincerely, terrifyingly. And she had walked away.

He had given everything—vulnerability, care, the rawest truth of who he was—and watched her shrink from it like it was filth. The rejection wasn’t just romantic. It was existential. A mirror held to everything unlovable inside him.

Now, each day began with a gut-deep mourning, not because of her, but for who he had been when he believed he was lovable.

Breakfast tasted of bitter failure, consumed mechanically without pleasure. He stared into his coffee, seeing reflected a lifetime of disappointments, each sip further embedding the bitterness into his soul.

His nervous system had learned to flinch before his mind caught up. The heart pounded not from fear, but from phantom alarms—set off by absence, by memory, by nothing at all. It wasn’t just a feeling. It was circuitry. A body remembering danger where there was none.

Even in silence, his internal noise screamed. He did not wake up. He rebooted—always from emergency mode.

2. Genetic Echoes

The commute to work was an assault on the senses. Crowded trains pressed bodies into one another like cattle in metal veins. Each step closer to the platform was a pulse in a living artery of modern survival. He moved among strangers, but their proximity felt like threat.

His heart pounded. His eyes gazed with cynical precision. His pupils dilated. The biological mechanisms of threat detection activated flawlessly—as if someone had flipped a switch labeled “predator nearby.”

The autonomic nervous system had evolved for the jungle, not for mass transit. It could not distinguish between the threat of rejection and being in a battle. All it knew was alert. All it knew was: Do not let down your guard.

He’d read the studies—how nearly 95% of human ancestral male genetic diversity had vanished over tens of thousands of years. How the male lineages that survived were forged in violence, in exile, in desperation. It wasn’t trauma. It was design.

Peace was not an evolutionary imperative. Survival was. Recognition was. And dominance, if nothing else worked.

He yearned to win. But he had never even learned the rules.

3. Insomnia's Cruel Embrace

The nights were torturous. Substance withdrawal leads to intensified nightmares, vivid and relentless, each filled with primal violence and terror, when his thoughts no longer filtered through civility or distraction. Sleep, if it came at all, came violently.

Tonight, sleep dragged him down like a tactical strike—fast, overwhelming, complete. And when he landed, it was on blood-warmed soil.

The battlefield was familiar now. Its silence was worse than chaos. Insects buzzed like circuitry. The trees bore no leaves, only nooses.

He moved, or rather, was moved—his body carried by some inherited momentum toward the center of carnage. Men fought with their bare hands. Spears shattered bones. Eyes rolled white in terror. And each time he looked, it was his face on every corpse.

There was no plot, no enemy, no victory condition. Only the fact that it must be done again. That was the loop.

“No peace,” whispered ghostly voices of fallen men. “Only struggle.”

And somewhere, her voice: soft, distant, mocking. “You were never enough.”

He jolted awake, breathless, already halfway through a panic response. The dream hadn’t ended—it had spilled. His amygdala surged without permission. His nervous system was replaying survival instructions from a war he had never fought.

He wasn’t experiencing terror.

He was executing a command.

4. Awakening to Terror

He woke in a posture of collapse—curled, damp, shaking. His chest was a vault of compressed panic, vibrating from the inside. The world around him hadn’t changed. But his body behaved like it had.

The air felt viscous. The walls closer. The heartbeat—a war drum.

He imagined her waking in someone else’s arms. Comfortable. Laughing.

“Why?” he whispered, barely audible. “Why can’t I escape this?”

His mind cycled through flashpoints with forensic precision: a glance, a silence, the sound of her voice saying goodbye. Over and over. Error-checking. Fault tracing. As if resolution lay in perfect understanding.

Then something darker stirred.

Maybe she deserves it too. Maybe she deserves the cold. The silence. The pain. The suffering.

The thought slid in like venom. And recoiled just as fast.

I am a monster, he thought. And the monster lives in loops.

He wasn’t remembering her.

He was running diagnostic simulations on loss. The orbitofrontal cortex which is involved in evaluating gains/losses, demanded resolution. The anterior cingulate flagged mismatched outcomes. Every failed memory re-activated the loop.

He couldn’t forgive her.

Because the system wouldn’t let him forget. So, how can he forgive?

5. Fleeting Comfort

Eventually, exhaustion pulled him under again—softer this time, like slipping into anesthesia.

For a moment, the world blurred. Pressure lifted. The body unclenched. The feedback loop loosened its grip.

A dream: her hand resting gently on his chest. A smile without malice. Her voice saying, “You are enough.”

His entire body sighed. His limbs loosened. The universe shrank to a soft cocoon.

And then—

Her face twisted. Her smile curdled. “Weak,” she spat. “You think this is comfort? You think you deserve rest?”

The dream shattered like glass against pavement. And what replaced it was worse:

A cold, clinical detachment.

He woke again, mouth dry, spine rigid. The insula cortex, which is responsible for self-reflection and emotional processing, had betrayed him—recorded a warm illusion, then pulled the floor from under it. The brain had offered a simulation of safety. Not to heal, but to test for threat resilience.

This wasn’t comfort.

It was exposure therapy.

Then he realised that men are made for survival and not for serenity!

6. Endless Cycle

Morning came without light.

The sun was up, but the world felt dimmed. He moved through his routine as a ghost in a machine: shower, shirt, shoes, keys. His fingers trembled when brushing his teeth, not from emotion—but from adrenal residue, pooled beneath the skin.

Each step outside felt algorithmic. One foot, then the other. Sunlight stung. Sounds of traffic felt weaponised. Eye contact was unbearable.

And the words returned:

You must survive.

Not thrive. Not love. Not rest.

Survive.

The greatest horror wasn’t the rejection, or the nightmares.

It was that his entire design—the very template of his being—didn’t want peace.

He carried forward a lineage that fought for food, for mates, for shelter, for meaning. But never for joy.

Hope wasn’t coded into the system. Only endurance.

And still, he walked. Not because he wanted to.

But because the machine kept moving.

7. Dream in Red

That night, he begged the universe for mercy. Not happiness. Just a moment of stillness. A flicker of peace. Something—anything—warm.

Sleep came like a trapdoor beneath a collapsing stage.

He stood barefoot in blood-warmed mud. The battlefield had changed. No longer chaotic, it was calm—eerily so. The sky above him was starless, the air humid, thick with the scent of sweat and rot. He looked down. Rows of faceless men knelt, heads bowed, stripped of armor, stripped of identity. Silent.

One of them looked up. It was his face. And then another. And another. Dozens. Hundreds. A thousand versions of himself stared, blank-eyed, waiting.

He wanted to run. To scream. But his body refused.

A voice, from behind:

“You’re the last one.”

He turned. A towering figure loomed—himself again, but older. Brutal. Stoic. Covered in scars, eyes devoid of illusion.

The voice continued. “They accepted it. The others. You haven’t.”

“Accepted what?” he whispered, throat tight.

“That peace is not meant for you. You are the weapon. You carry the memory of pain. You exist to run. To fight. And die.”

The loop of animosity started again. He clutched his ears, trying to drown them out, but its presence was louder than screams—screaming silence inside his skull, echoing with feelings too primal to ignore.

Every ancestor in the mud behind him had known it. Every neuron in his body was tuned to it. The biological algorithm never ended. You run until collapse. You endure until erasure.

8. The Shattering

He woke up gasping, convulsing. The air in his room tasted stale. Every inch of his body ached with the echo of lives he hadn’t lived but remembered hiding inside his genes nonetheless. His arms trembled as he held himself, rocking gently, desperate for comfort.

For the first time, he understood the horror wasn't in the nightmare.

It was in the familiarity of it.

These dreams were not fiction. They were electrical storms—dopamine trickling through ruined circuits, begging for a hit of something lost. A high called ‘her.’ A pain called ‘purpose.’

They were memories. Not his own, but carried forward—genetic scars passed from every man before him who had fought, lost, endured. The tremors in his hands were echoes. The nightmares, the rejection, the dread—they weren’t defects.

They were inheritance.

He looked at his reflection in the black screen of his laptop. Hollow eyes. Pale skin. The modern man’s disguise couldn’t hide the ancient truth. We are destined to constantly fight, suffer and die.

And maybe, to hate those we once loved, in moments we most needed love. The audacity the self creates—to feel hatred toward someone else for leaving, to wish for their suffering, only to recoil in disgust at itself for daring to think something so primal, so cruel. It was a loop of violence turned inward, a shame that fed on its own echo.

The most advanced part of his brain—the one built for moral reasoning—was being hijacked by a system that evolved not to love, but to compete.

9. The Quiet Violence of Day

At work, everything grated. Polite meetings. Digital spreadsheets. Subtle social games. All of it rang false. Every smile, a performance. Every “How are you?” a trap.

He watched his coworkers laugh and nod, their posture tense, their faces twitching with micro-expressions of fear, envy, desire, and disgust. All pretending. All surviving in their own unique way.

He wasn't alone in the nightmare.

They were all the same. Just quieter. Just better at it.

He wondered who among them cried in the shower. Who stared too long at kitchen knives. Who fell asleep with YouTube playing—not out of boredom, but to drown the primal instincts.

There was no way to know. Everyone hid it. Because weakness is still dangerous. Because peace, even now, was reserved for the few.

And love? Love was the most craved possession of all. The ultimate neurological reward—once gained, now denied—haunting every neural network like withdrawal.

The nucleus accumbens, associated with craving, once bright with dopamine, was now a vacant tunnel. The craving didn’t fade—it fermented. His sadness wasn’t a symptom. It was the signal that the reward was lost, and the system was failing.

10. Acceptance

That night, he sat on the floor. No lights. No distractions.

The question returned: Why can’t I improve?

But now, a quieter answer came: Because you weren’t broken. Because you were forged.

Everything—his hypervigilance, his dread, his obsession with being better—it wasn’t sickness. Those were desperate memories, passed down through generations.

He whispered, slowly:“I was built for storms, not silence.”

His breath slowed. His jaw unclenched. The trembling in his spine softened. Not healed. Not freed. But finally aligned with the truth.

He would never be peaceful.

But he didn’t have to hate himself for it.

He didn’t sleep easy that night.

But he didn’t fight sleep either.

The ache remained. The loops continued. The shadows came as they always did.But now, he let them.

Not as enemies. Not as defects.

But as echoes. As proof that he was still alive. Still moving. Still functional.

And in the stillness between thoughts, something else stirred—Not hope, not relief—But a strange, quiet dignity.

Because survival, stripped of illusion, was not emptiness. It was endurance.

And for the first time, the nightmare didn’t win.

He did.

Because he didn’t run.

Because he stayed.

Because he endured.

And that was enough.

For now.

END