Much has been written about and said of Wrexham as a town to visit and to live in, and desiring to continue the tradition of marketing the city to overseas investors this author will not fail to give an accurate depiction, in the following, of the circumstances in which our protagonist has lived in for the past seven years as an on and off again university student.
After having walked quickly away from his student accommodation, and even faster past the clump of student accommodations one minute walking distance from his own, where he heard even more people talk amongst themselves than before, Rod Beasley plugged his ears with his Bluetooth earphones and played his favourite music playlist, which he designed initially to help him cope with that particular human emotion we call sadness, but which he ended up using to elicit within him such a devastating feeling that if another were to listen to it that they would surely consider whether life was in fact worth living, and jaywalked two sets of T-Junctions without so much as looking to see if a car was heading to join the main road; all the while he was lost in thought of the past, ruminating about the woman he had mistreated terribly, and who had finally had enough and left him for good.
As he ruminated on this, he approached the last set of traffic lights, languishing in the centre of the road with his teary eyes lingering on one of several 100-inch plasma screen billboards dotted around the centre. A beautiful woman looked down on him: that’s all he allowed himself to see before he turned away and continued past the shopping centre, his eyes alert for any sign of her among the loud, boisterous crowd. Just as his heart leapt whenever there was an indication of brown hair near him, so did it rise even higher in a sort of delirious ecstasy whenever he was wrong; he enjoyed their frightful looks of confusion, as though he was a predator, and they were the prey.
“I have to escape,” he thought bitterly, his envious heart raging in his chest. “Maybe she still lives in that neighbourhood by the river, where that bridge is...” he whipped his head back to look over his shoulder, “No,” he thought, wincing, and grabbing at the collar of his shirt in frustration, “this is wrong, totally wrong. I can’t cross that line because once it’s crossed, I wouldn’t be able to hold back anymore. But...”
He pointed at the screen, unconcerned with how out of place an action like that would seem to the onlookers walking by him, and shook terribly like he was seeing a ghost in front of him. For many months, he had isolated himself from the two remaining friends who would still put up with him, and thus the sight of one of them, on a billboard in his own city no less, perplexed him greatly. He turned several times, to the castle wall on the right, and to the nightclubs and restaurants on the left, where people of both genders sat chatting amongst themselves, some old and some young, and some attractive and some not so much, and dug his nails into his flesh, wondering if they too had ever experienced anything like this. One white middle aged, grey-whiskered fellow met his eyes over the shoulder of his young brunette daughter, and the young man turned away with shame, and scowled.
It was not because he was envious of these people who had stable and satisfying relationships, for he had learned over time to accept that he would never have a life like the rest of humanity; but that for many months since cutting contact with his former childhood friends, the two who put up with his abject, loathsome behaviour, he had lost friends as quickly as he made them. His turbulent emotions were too troublesome to bear for those who liked him, too unsettling for those who were attracted to him, and too embarrassing for those who wanted to use him; for this young man, underneath the draggy clothes he inhabited, was a handsome figure.
Although the doctors and those of unapologetic honesty would not hesitate to say that he was morbidly obese, he still retained that trace of Grecian heritage most presumed he possessed upon first meeting. Only, the thought that he indeed possessed an advantage over others in this regard served further to disgrace him and propagate his feelings of shame and invalidity, for he could not take advantage of this at all. He was consumed with and by self-hatred, but he found that cementing over it with egocentricism was better than destroying himself with self-pity and pathetic behaviour. By this time, he had given up completely at believing that he could be like other people, and enjoy the trivialities the commoners took for granted, like satisfying friendships for example, and sought only for his own self-satisfaction at the expense of others in the shortest amount of time possible before he was discovered for what he was: a cockroach. In this way, he scuttled to and fro from person to person, sucking up their attention and moving on to the next; as it was currently late June, the university had shut for summer and most of the young people had gone home, and so he looked forward like a shrewd entrepreneur, whose many ventures had failed thus far, but whose next idea is the sure one to turn a life-changing profit, for the beginning of the next academic year when the freshers, unacquainted with his type, would come.
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He rubbed his hands fervently as he thought over this plan, which gave him the tiniest sliver of hope that his fortunes would turn around, and smiled to himself. “Yes, yes – I want to make friendships. But they’ll fall apart eventually (very quickly) and this fact makes me scared,” he thought, with a downcast spirit. “Hm...what should I do? What can I do? Everyone will leave me as they have done in the past. I must get in quickly and get what I want quickly and then leave and move onto the next. People would find this line of thinking dangerous,” he chuckled as he shrugged, “but what choice do they give me? My life has been terrible, and I am thus terrible. Is it such a surprise that I am a terrible human being? What does it mean to be a bad person anyway?” he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pound coin he had kept, which the receptionist at his student accommodation had given him to test one of their new laundry machines, and to which he now fiddled and twirled between his fingers, and chuckled some more, “I have gained nothing by playing by their rules. I have gained nothing.”
He looked up at the billboard again like a vampire at the sun, his scorn-filled eyes twitching madly, and studied it more carefully, before thinking to himself, “You snake; you utter snake. You liar!” The young man winced and placed his trembling hand on his chest as though he had just been stabbed, and continued in his rumination, “You stole my idea for the system – even after telling me it was the most stupid thing you had ever heard in your entire life!”
The bald polish man on the billboard looked down upon him with his faux-gentle eyes like a conservative to a disabled migrant woman seeking equal treatment: and he was at once reminded of the deceptive, greedy, hypocritical, jealous, conniving, racist and sexist company he once kept, and who’s influence he had hoped to escape from when he finally moved to Wrexham all those years ago, but which he unfortunately kept coming back to for reasons he could not comprehend himself – perhaps fear? He did not have the self-awareness at this late hour to comprehend anything else. It was only recently where he finally thought of a possible reason as to why this man retained their friendship for so long, why he kept accepting him back when others grew tired, and that reason was because he knew Rod possessed a brilliant mind, home to many an idea which his own could not produce; of course, his friend did not admit this – he even denied it passionately whenever Rod brought it up. So much so was the case, that even Rod had doubted himself up until he saw the billboard loom over the capital that night.
The sound on Duke Street, where he was standing after having traversed Queen Street, was oppressive: and the bustle and laughter and shouts and chatter all about him, and those proud buskers playing decade-old pop songs, so reminiscent of his childhood (before it all went south; when he had friendships and thought nothing of it) - all of that plucked the nervous strings of the young man’s brain like a bored child upon an acoustic guitar. The unrestrained joviality of the young men around him, which he sought to understand more of (why do they continue to live under these conditions? How?) and the attractiveness of the woman accompanying them whom he wanted to be validated by, although he knew that physical relationships were not the answer to his plight, finished the mind-crushing process that the billboard had started. His heart seized, and he wished all the more for it to stop right then and there so that he might not have to go on living.
The young man drew back like one of the brown, fuzzy rats scuttling across the city, and cocked his head up; then, realising that what he had seen was in fact real and not a trick of a tired and overzealous mind, he almost fell upon his knees as though they were spinning plates and their sticks were suddenly ripped away.
“Wha-What? How? That prick!” he muttered in confusion, his face pale and his bottom lip quivering as he looked at the figure portrayed in 8k resolution: it was his childhood friend, one of the few friends he still had.
“Invest in a System; Invest in Systemcare by Aleku” the advertisement caption read.
“That fucker did it! That fucker actually did it.”