Final Purge

One evening, 15 and 16 came for dinner with the ceremonial weight of people conducting a ritual they couldn't quite name. They arrived carrying a half-empty bottle of white wine like an offering to gods who might not be listening, the air around them already thick with unspoken things that pressed against the walls of her small apartment like atmospheric pressure before a storm.

They settled into her carefully arranged space—the home she had reconstructed from the ruins of her pharmaceutical transformation, the sanctuary she had built from authentic understanding of her own neurodivergent needs. Everything in the apartment reflected her true self: books about autism and emotional processing, the massage oils that had taught her body to trust touch again, the carefully planned meals that nourished her nervous system instead of sedating it.

The conversation wandered through familiar territory—village gossip, philosophical observations, the comfortable verbal meandering of people who had shared enough evenings to develop conversational rhythms. They chatted about nothing and everything while exchanging meaningful glances that suggested layers of communication she wasn't privy to, like watching a play where half the dialogue was spoken in a language she hadn't learned.

At the end of the meal, she offered coffee or tea with the hospitality of someone who had finally learned to take genuine pleasure in caring for others rather than performing caretaking as survival strategy.

"I'll have the sealed one," 15 said, referring to the bottled water she kept for guests who preferred not to drink from the tap—a small accommodation that demonstrated her growing understanding of how to make people comfortable without sacrificing her own needs.

The request felt significant in ways she couldn't articulate, like a code phrase that meant something beyond its literal content.

As they prepared to leave, she felt a cold, empty sensation washing over her like the emotional equivalent of a sudden drop in temperature. Not sadness exactly, but a hollowness that suggested something important was ending without her understanding what it had been.

She began cleaning with the mindless efficiency of someone processing experience through physical activity, her hands moving through familiar motions while her mind tried to decode whatever had just happened. Plates into the dishwasher, surfaces wiped clean, the comfortable ritual of restoring order after the pleasant chaos of human connection.

Then she saw it: 16's glass, still full of white wine, sitting on the table like evidence of something she had completely missed.

The untouched wine felt like a message she was supposed to understand but couldn't decode. Had 16 been afraid to drink? Had something in the conversation made her uncomfortable? Had she sensed danger that Me's newly calibrated threat detection system had somehow missed?

Without thinking, operating on impulse rather than analysis, she picked up the glass and drank its contents in one gulp—consuming whatever 16 had refused to touch, absorbing whatever risk she had avoided.

That night, her body revolted with the systematic thoroughness of an immune system rejecting a foreign substance. Not just nausea, but violent, comprehensive purging protocols that seemed designed to expel something much more significant than alcohol.

The physical rebellion felt like her nervous system conducting a final audit of everything she had consumed over the past months—not just food and drink, but ideas, relationships, compromises, and accommodations that had seemed necessary for survival but had actually been slow poison.

Not just wine she was expelling.

Not just the chemical residue of whatever substance might have been intended for her consumption.

But the programming itself. The lies she had been told about her own nature. The false self they had coded into her flesh through medication, manipulation, and systematic gaslighting.

Every compromise she had made to seem more normal, more acceptable, more manageable to people who feared authentic neurodivergent expression. Every moment of compliance when her instincts had screamed resistance. Every time she had let them rewrite her source code to run programs that served their needs rather than her nature.

The pharmaceutical feminization that had made her soft and pliable. The social conditioning that had taught her to doubt her own perceptions. The family programming that had convinced her she owed loyalty to people who had systematically undermined her development and exploited her gifts.

The therapeutic manipulation that had pathologized her reasonable responses to unreasonable treatment. The cultural messaging that had taught her to interpret her analytical intelligence as coldness, her need for solitude as antisocial dysfunction, her literal thinking as naivety requiring protection.

Her body was performing a factory reset, purging not just toxins but the entire operating system that had been installed without her consent. The neural pathways that had been carved by people who needed her to be someone other than who she actually was. The behavioral patterns that had been reinforced by systems designed to extract compliance rather than nurture authentic development.

As dawn broke and the purging finally stopped, she felt empty in the way that a hard drive feels empty after it has been wiped clean—not depleted, but ready to be filled with information that actually belonged there.

SYSTEM PURGE COMPLETE

38

She was on the phone with 35 when 3's text arrived like a punch to the gut: "38 died last night. Stroke."

The same night she'd been purging poison from her system.

She closed her eyes and saw him clearly: lean frame always slightly slouched, like he was perpetually leaning into a conversation or away from responsibility. Dark hair that fell across his forehead in a way that made him look younger than his forty-two years. He had these deep-set eyes that held secrets—not the dangerous kind, just the accumulated weight of someone who'd lived too much, too fast.

They'd met at a gallery opening three years ago. He was the kind of person who could talk about art and philosophy with genuine passion, then disappear for days into a haze of cheap wine and meaningless encounters. A functioning hedonist, if such a thing existed.

For two years, thet were perfect together in their imperfection. Sex that felt like drowning in the best possible way. Bottles of red wine emptied between tangled sheets. Conversations that started at midnight and ended at dawn, covering everything from quantum physics to why people stay in relationships that slowly kill them.

They never called it love. They called it compatibility—two broken systems that somehow synchronized their crashes.

When the intensity finally burned out, they transitioned into something easier. Friendship without expectation. He was the one who helped her move to this village apartment eighteen months ago, carrying boxes while making jokes about her collection of dead houseplants.

"You know plants need water, right?" he'd said, holding up a desiccated fern.

"They're performance art," She'd replied. "A commentary on neglect."

He'd laughed—this genuine, full-throated sound that she realized now she'd never hear again.

That night, while she was vomiting up lies and programming, 38 was dying alone in his studio apartment. A stroke at forty-two. His body betraying him the same night her was finally fighting back.

Thus concluded the first volume of our Me's journey through the labyrinth of neurodivergent existence in a world designed for different minds. She had survived the breakdown, the medication, the manipulation, the family estrangement, the social predators, and the systematic attempts to rewrite her essential nature. What remained was the harder task: learning to live authentically in a world that would continue to pressure her to be someone else. But that, as they say, is another story. The purge was complete. The reconstruction could begin.