Diary of a Hitman from VICE Summer 2025 Issue
I have a hard time maintaining friendships—which is to be expected, given that I can’t discuss what I do for a living. It’s the ultimate conversation stopper, isn’t it? When someone at a dimly lit bar, the kind where the ice in your glass sounds louder than the music, asks you ‘So, what do you do?’ and you have to craft a lie so seamless it becomes a second skin.I’m a logistics consultant, I sometimes say, which is technically true, if you consider the final, permanent relocation of a human being a matter of supply chain management. The loneliness isn't in the act itself, which is clinical, a matter of geometry and ballistics, but in the aftermath, in the quiet return to a life where you cannot share the day’s burdens.I remember sitting across from a mark once, a man whose name I’d known for weeks but whose face I was only now seeing in the flickering candlelight of a family restaurant. He was laughing, a real, belly-deep laugh with his wife and two young daughters, and for a moment, I wasn't a specter at the feast; I was just another patron, invisible.That’s the profound strangeness of this work—the intimacy of knowing the last meal of a man whose name you will never speak aloud, of seeing the mundane details of a life you are about to extinguish. It creates a one-way mirror between you and the rest of humanity.You observe their rituals, their joys, their petty arguments, all from behind a pane of glass that you can never break. You become a student of human behavior, not out of curiosity, but out of necessity, learning the patterns of grief, of suspicion, of routine, all to better blend in or to find the perfect, silent moment.The psychological toll isn't the blood on your hands, which washes away, but the erosion of your own identity. Who are you when your primary function is a secret? Your relationships become performances, your past a carefully constructed fiction.You can’t talk about a bad day at the office, you can’t seek comfort, you can’t be truly known. This isolation is the real price of the job, a tax on your soul paid in the currency of silence, and it’s a debt that compounds with every assignment, building a fortress around you that no one else can even see, let alone breach.
JA
Jamie Larson123k2 days ago
wow that’s a heavy read tbh the isolation sounds worse than the job itself
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