It is August eighth, 2026. I await my trial, accused of every crime I have committed during the two decades I have crawled through society. For some, I have repented. For others, acknowledgement hasn’t come so easily. The oldest are the ones I will never free myself of. The length of my sentence must be decided by the jury, who shall be easily swayed towards the DA, for I have opted to represent myself. Though I have no legal education or experience, I have refused my universal right to a lawyer. My actions are solely mine. I am guilty of my crimes. Why should another be burdened to fight against them? To argue that I, the perpetrator, was innocent in some way. Why argue a point that neither of us believes in, merely to fool the opposition and set me free to the very society I have harmed. This will be used to cripple the narrative my sole supporter has somehow formed. Perhaps in creating my case, he has broken more laws than I had. The forgery of evidence being the lightest of them.
I apologize for all that I’ve done, to all that I’ve done them to. I am guilty of it all. For every word I spoke and regretted. For every thought I’ve had. For the ones I acted on. For the ones I didn’t act on, not yet anyway. Perhaps the judge will allow me respite, and chain my fists to the bars of a prison, or perhaps a hospital. That decision was never mine to make. It now lies in the hands of the bureaucratic system.
This is my plea. I plead guilty. This confession serves to undo all that my lawyer has achieved. This confession accuses my lawyer of breaking the law over and over again. He is a criminal just as I, and deserves to be chained alongside me. He doesn’t deserve to plead insane. He is too knowledgeable, too normal. The jury will never hear his pleas. He is guilty, and he is more than aware of it. He has created alternate realities so vivid, that they have put great authors to shame. He has told me stories about my own life that I had never thought of. He has taken my life and made it his. The government discarded me the moment they took away my personal liberties, and assigned me a saviour. I have never asked for one. I have never needed one. I used to be proud of having engineered my own life, the way I saw fit. Sure, I have made mistakes, vile ones. But they were my mistakes. Mine to make, mine to defend or not to. They were mine and mine alone. Not only has he taken my story from me, but discarded what I had worked so hard to build and rewrote it. Whatever the courtroom decides, I am a dead man, regardless of whether I’m set free, or get sentenced to death. My lawyer has guaranteed it.
It is not just the lawyer and I that are guilty, but those who have broken the law and have insisted on giving me a fair trial despite me refusing it. They accuse me of having rights that I renounced long ago.
Perhaps the guiltiest of us all are the jury, that have denied me my sins. Who are they to interfere in God’s judgement? Who are they to intervene in the only thing I have left? Who are they to pose as divine figures, able to send people to heaven or to hell? In setting me free they have finalised my doom. What will happen to me then, if I live comfortably now?
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