I'm Obsessed With Serial Killers

I don't know where I started, or what made me into the thing I am today, if you can even call it a thing anymore. I don't feel. I don't care, not in the way other people do.
Sometimes I like to imagine what things would be like if I had emotions, until I see people go into a fit of rage or a spiralling depression, and I become so disconnected that I can't help but look the other way to find an escape. I don't think I could do that, care about things like they do. I just don't understand it. I think I got the better end of the deal, though, and that's all I need to keep telling myself. My life is clean, easy, and under control. My control.
There's only one thought that consumes my mind. Death. It's always been this way. I was a suicidal teenager, in a sense. I didn't really want to die, I just wanted a way to feel alive. Somehow, I guess I figured drinking antifreeze and taking 25 pills while my parents were away would work.
It didn't, by the way.
But it did do one thing, it taught me how to use people's emotions to manipulate them. I've learned how to bribe people, threaten them into bending to my will. I haven't tried it out on my friends, really, or my brother now that I think of it, but I have always been the master of manipulating my parents. I couldn't live in their house otherwise, I couldn't deal with the thought of losing control over my own life.
I never asked them for anything. I didn't ask to be born, sheltered, raised, or fed. I didn't ask for anything from them. So why should I feel grateful for something forced on me?
I don't know what gratitude is, though. It's just a word. Sort of like love. Nothing more than letters on paper, a sound in the air with no tangible meaning. A product of society that has passed me by, neglecting to share this 'feeling' thing with me.
Why did it do this to me? Why do other people feel?
They pity me. They love me. They care about me. I don't return any of it, so why do they care? I can't grasp it. I never have been able to. It doesn't usually bother me, or at least, it didn't use to.
The thing is, these sort of feelings come to me every time mum and dad invite me to a family gathering. The Zephyr Family Reunion. As if there's some blood bond between family, as if there's something that makes my mum and dad more important than Bryce, the crazy guy with an office next to mine, or Liliana, my next door neighbour, and, whatever it means to be one, best friend. Is that really how people feel about family?

I wasn't up to leaving San Francisco for some wacky family reunion in Reno, Nevada, but it was something I figured I have to do. If I were to keep my cover and stay somewhat normal in the eyes of my family, at least show them that I'm still alive and doing well enough to get by. They won't have to check up on me in this case. I won't need to bother with them past this one gruelling weekend. Weighing the options against eachother, I figured this was the better one. So I packed my bags, readying myself for three days in Reno, away from the life, if you can even use the word life to describe the empty, analytical and meaningless motions I go through every day, I knew in San Francisco.

At the hotel, I was greeted by my brother, Byron. He's not a bad guy. I've never had anything against Byron, in fact, if I cared more, I would probably like him. He's some big-time physicist for some research lab. It all goes over my head - the only physics I care about are blood as it rushes out of a body. Or brains as they would splatter against the wall after someone is shot in the head. I guess the only science I care about is the morbid science behind death. Why, then, do I waste my time working in a rehabilitation clinic for narcotic abusers? I guess they're the closest I can come to people I feel a relation to, an understanding for. These addicts, they're as cold and empty as me. The only difference is, they did it to themselves. I didn't. I was just born this way.
Byron had to shake his hand in front of my face a few times to catch me in my spiralling train of thought. "Nyxon, you're in the room next to mine. Mum checked you in already. Come on, let's go!"
I bit my lip and followed him. I need to stop living my life so much in my head. The thing is, I can't say any of the things I'm thinking out loud. I just can't, because they aren't normal.
"I'm really tired," I told him, "I think I'm gonna get some sleep for tonight. Come fill me in on the plan in the morning." I nodded to him and stepped into my room as he left, agreeing to talk in the morning.
My room wasn't bad, there was a nicely made king-sized bed in the middle of it. It was a typical hotel room, a table and some living chairs in the corner, a desk with instructions for their 'complementary wi-fi service.' At least I didn't have to pay extra for it. Actually, I wasn't paying for anything at this hotel. I manipulated my parents into it, as always.
Smiling to myself as I layed down in the centre of the giant bed, I didn't have as much difficulty as usual slipping into a dazed, dream-like state. All I could see was red. Blood. Flesh. I wanted to taste it, feel the freshly killed human meat as I bit into it, savoring the iron taste preserved in the blood coming out of it. I'm not a cannibal, I've never tasted another person. Not yet. I just want to, really fucking badly. I have since I was about 15 years old... 10 years later, I still haven't gotten up the nerve to try it. Not past the point of drinking my own blood, which, trust me, I've done more than my fair share of.
Somewhere in the fantasies of messed-up cannibalism, my insomnia decided to give me a break, and I drifed off to sleep with the hum of the radiator singing to me in the background.