A thought flashed across his mind: “She was always against me. Everyone hates me.” A slideshow of memories from highschool, a spectacle of haunting memories, a burgeoning sense that his perceptions were skewed by his previous life experiences, all seemed to plague him all at once like a coordinated attack. At that instant, there appeared to his peripheral vision people from his past looking at him from behind the trees to his side. He was always looking around himself, especially at women. Not because of any desire, mind you, though that certainly played a factor in it, but because he was simply afraid. Afraid! Why was he so afraid?
“There is plenty reason to be afraid, mind you,” he muttered to himself as he wobbled from side to side, his feet killing him. “Mind you, there is plenty reason to be afraid,” he repeated, laughing a little. He then remembered the woman he had become somewhat acquainted with (enough to be considered a ‘friend’ - though he did not understand the promiscuous obsession with such a word; it being flung about like horse dung and all) and how he accused her of gossiping about his ‘condition’ to other people in their circle. She denied it, but he did not believe her. He was not so angry about it, however, after confronting her, but he realised that this was a common behaviour he often employed without thinking to his ‘friends’. He often ranted at them about what was in his head.
Rod turned around and started back towards the gate, angry at the thoughts that had emerged in his head like an aggressive drunk in the middle of the night; at one point he was sound asleep, following the phantom woman as though carried on a cloud, and the next he was shaken quite literally to the core as though he had seen a ghost.
But his legs struggled against the sudden blasts of wind. Again, the intolerable nerve-tingling sensation seared up his leg like pins and needles; again, he promised God the world for another chance at life.
And for a little bit, for a few minutes, he felt utterly lonely and exceptionally bitter, he ruminated about things that other people seemed not to understand or know, or refused to acknowledge; he was training to become a healthcare professional, but he had failed repeatedly his assignments because of the institutional politics at play: for instance, he was upset that his course did not involve the serious analysis of socioeconomic factors on health inequality. Oh, how he lamented capitalism. Several times he tried to think like other people, but each time he came up blank and frustrated.
“Businesses...It is either their interests or the women and children that they exploit. I bet that they had a hand in creating this education system that we currently have. But it is because of them that I have had the life that I have had, I guess. Oh, how circular,” he thought. “People are material resources,” he continued, “that is something that I have to keep in mind.”
His head burned up from the inside, and he placed his hands on his head as though that would cool it, or at least stop it from rising in temperature. The wind continued to push against his wearied, ragged body, his hood spazzing behind his head.
He was pushed back several paces, so much so that all his progress since he had turned around had been erased in a couple of blasts.
“Oh, God, won’t you just kill me? Why keep me alive? Stop this madness and let me leave,” he cried aloud again, his chin to the sky, and his legs shivering with dried, crusted blood. “For decades you have deprived me of what a human ought to have. I kept telling myself that it would get better – but it has not! I am a dog; I am a dog. Kill me, I tell you, strike me down. I do not want to be here. What good is it to give me this condition? Euthanise me!”
Again, the wind blew strongly against him as though a huge invisible hand was pressing upon him, so much so that he was nearing the palace quicker than when he had faced it earlier. The trees beside him bent to one side towards the ground, almost touching the grass.
“She killed my heart!” he screamed. “She killed all desire for a woman! I cannot bear it. I hate her; I hate her, and I know that I shouldn’t, but I do. I am angry and I want her to know how angry I am,” he cried, waving his fists into the air. “Oh, God, I am angry! How can I move on? How can I? She destroyed everything! Oh, I am distraught! I am fucking angry! Fuck this,” he seethed, his mouth frothing with saliva. He struggled harder against the prevailing wind, “I cannot be like them: I am fundamentally different from everyone else. I do not want to lie and become false and manipulate to become popular because that is what I will do if I go back.”
“You don’t treat people like this... Is this how you treat your friends?” He remembered her once saying to him towards the end of their friendship.
“All these fucking rules I have to follow,” he thought bitterly, clenching his fists. “I don’t understand. What do I want? Do I even want a girlfriend? I cannot be bothered. It is too much effort. Yes, I would like to be liked, even loved and desired and wanted. But if I have to fake it, suppress myself, repress myself, hide myself, then, is it even worth it? Ha, they want to kill me, don’t they?”
He stopped resisting the wind, allowing it to push him a couple steps backwards before it stopped suddenly. His eyes scanned the grey, bleak, and mechanical landscape in front of him; and then he raised them to the sky again, inspecting the drifting bundling clouds, and perceiving that their formation resembled that of a group of friends, he was instantly taken back to the time where he had such a conglomeration of people around him. When he was 11, he had all the attention in the world that he so craved after the death of his father and the subsequent neglect of his own mother, which itself was filled with its own cloud of intoxication, patching back together the life that he had lost in that past year. But soon afterwards it was suddenly ripped from him with no explanation. As he dwelt upon these sorrowful memories, he bent at the waist, stooping as though he had an intense stomachache, and stared at his own, wet and ragged trainers. They were a strong neon blue with thick, sickly bright green oval shapes on their sides. He stared at them in a strange way. He glanced behind him with a bitter, hateful air at the house like a caught-out goblin. His face softened like an untwisting rag as pictures of his bed flashed in his wearied, drowsy mind as the acknowledgment that he was powerless to change the past punctured his heart like a cool sedative. At the same time, however, he looked at his cold, trembling hands; his right hand, crusted with white flakes around his knuckles, was clenched of its own accord, as though it had a mind of its own. So, he was truly not at all ready to lie down and die like a dog after all.
As he reflected on this, he remembered that back when he was in highschool he did not understand why people treated him so poorly, so differently, so absurdly disproportionately. Now, he realised, after going through the same experience again in university, he had been doing it all wrong. He had come at it from a different angle from everyone else.
“I’m not ill,” he said to himself, his bottom lip splitting as his mouth moved to form these words, “They refuse to take responsibility. It is the secretary of state for health and social care who is at fault; it is the secretary of state for education who is at fault!”
“Yes, yes,” he murmured, rubbing his frigid hands together like one concocting a well-planned plan. “There is no one coming to save me. I must take from life. Fuck these psychologists. I’ll go into the System.”
And Rod went off into his childish giggle, clasping his stoney, dry hands.
Instantly, he turned around, thrusting his right leg forward as though he were a clown on stilts, and fixed his eyes on the house, on the shadowy figure that lurked on the front porch, whose bright eyes laid heavily upon him.
“She’s judging me,” he thought, his heart pulsating in his mouth. “I want to run away; but I keep doing that whenever I see her in the street by chance. I am so afraid,” he thought, clenching his dry, brittle hair. “I’ll not run away this time!” He shook his head, his face scrunched in intense concentration. “But she will judge me, and... and... What if she does? Shall it kill me? Yes, it will certainly.”
He was flinging himself forward, the wind pushing as though consciously at his back, but he felt, along with dread, a sense of lightness and hilarity about it all. He dreaded the woman’s judgement, what she would say and do, but at the same time he was laughing at himself, thinking himself absurd for even having these thoughts. “Do other people have these thoughts?” he wondered. “I want a woman but at the same time I do not want one. What an absurdity.”
But no sooner had he begun laughing than his heart swelled with intense and mortifying grief and despair. “No, I cannot bear it... Why won’t she come back to me?” he thought exasperatedly. His knees buckled like stacked plates on a single hand. “You woman! You are terrifying me.”
As he neared the driveway, the feelings of shame, regret and emasculation had become so overwhelming that he considered shrinking into a corner and never emerging. Despite the promise of these regrets, however, his inclinations pulled him yet again away from the woman of his dreams and towards the city, even though his whole body was cramped, and his feet undoubtedly blistered.
“I want her so fucking much,” he cried into the sky. “Why, O God, why? Might I ask why you created me? Come on, Lord,” he screamed, striking the air with the butt of his index finger, “we had a deal, did we not?”
As he walked towards the city, Rod remembered that he had always wanted to get this woman, who once called him a friend, to respond to his messages. But she never responded to him as much as he liked, sometimes taking weeks to reply to him on social media. As a result, he was always bitter and mean to her at some point or another because images would flash in his mind of her spending time with other men. This was true, in a way, for she was in fact having conversations with other men while leaving his messages unseen on social media. Whenever he brought this up, however, she would not respond to him. It was exhausting and he was always miserable. He kept falling in love with women who prioritised other men over him.
“You can fuck right off,” he thought bitterly. But then he looked behind him at the house, as though afraid that the woman could hear him, and his heart pounded intensely. He was riddled with the impulse to run into the house, down the corridor and into the basement to activate the System.
“And what do I do once I’m there [in highschool]? Will I really be able to change my life?” He stopped suddenly and snorted, wiping his nose. “What do I have to lose?” he thought with a smirk as he looked sneakily over his shoulder. “But what of the money?” he asked himself, his brows lifting in genuine perplexity, “This is a life changing amount of money. I will never have to work again.”
He inhaled heavily, the cold air scratching itself against his dry throat. “No woman compares to her.”
By several inches his resolution became more pronounced on his face as he gained the more of it, he restrained himself, however, in order that he might not make it obvious the conclusion he had arrived at so joyously.
“This woman, this beautiful woman, how has she gripped my heart? Hm... what if I meet another woman,” he suggested, “would I not just feel the same as I do now? Am I just acting based on feelings as opposed to acute calculation? My mind it hurts...”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Rod was very aware that his mind was troubled by his thoughts. He was terrified that he would act out on them; he attempted to fixate on something at least so as to focus all his attention on one thing as opposed to several things, but he could not do that at this time. But the image of the woman behind him, who he knew deep down must have been merely a figment of his overactive imagination, greatly interested in – even though it greatly pained him as well!
From the distance she looked like the woman in question, for the figure was a shoulder-length brunette; and her eyes were big and blue like diamonds; her face, too, was cut like a diamond.
“Why are you ignoring me?” he gasped, clutching at his chest in anguish, seemingly suffering from a heart condition whose symptoms only showed when he was in the vicinity of such a woman. He limped quicker and quicker towards her, exhausted now, delirious and out of touch with his surroundings. He was not even aware of the feces slowly sliding itself out of his rectum like a worm struggling to break free from the earth. Worms... now that he reflected, he had always been preoccupied with the creature... intensely fascinated by their seemingly brainless movements and existence, yet empathetic living conditions.
The woman by the front door must have had enough, for she left the front porch and entered through the giant double doors, leaving it open behind her. Immediately, Rod was filled with an even greater sense of fear, and he quickly leapt forward with an apparent sluggishness, but which he made up with by sheer effort, and clambered after her with a horrifying and off-putting see-sawing of his shoulders. He tore open his grey zipped-up Nike jacket, which a friend had given to him, but which he then subsequently punctured unintentionally by getting the sleeve caught on a fence as he was walking into town one morning, and threw it on the ground with a defiant air. As he neared the house, he could see directly inside the landing, though it was much darker now that the sun had come out, for the chandelier was switched off and the natural light allowed to pour in through the stained windows. His cheeks now were pink and blushing as he stormed into the palace, crossed brows and all the features of a madman intent on committing the ultimate heist.
“What do you want?” shouted a voice from the corner, where the corridor to the basement was, seemingly from one of the daughters; which daughter, Rod could not gather, nor did he care.
The wind picked up now in a maddening fury, for he heard it hurl itself savagely against the front of the house, snapping against even the stained-glass windows like a petulant child and knocking the chandelier several inches each omnidirectional way like a worn-out joystick. He stood seemingly alone in the sunken landing, the red carpet now a dull red as opposed to the artificial bright it held earlier, asking himself whether it was the right thing to do or not. It seemed wrong to go in uninvited, to invade his only friend’s home like this; but what choice did he have? Aleku said more than once that he would not amount to anything, that he was a failure through and through; this was confirmed by all accounts by his experiences with other people. But this was by no means the decisive factor in his decision now to take action: no, on the contrary, the decision to take matters into his own hands stemmed from the intolerant realisation that he was more intelligent than the great swathes of people around him. He was careful not to let this get to his head; but how could it not? He stood there, thinking over, mulling over, ruminating about what his friends had said repeatedly: “you are a narcissist.” “Not true,” he objected, speaking to himself. He had gotten good at speaking to himself.
Rod then remembered another woman, his dance teacher, who had sought to be his friend (as lots of women do) and how he could not get over how condescending all her conduct seemed to be towards him. All the niceties, all the acts of friendship... she bought him bubble tea, invited him into her home and cooked him and her small group of friends a homemade dinner... how condescending! She thought that he was simple, that he was stupid, that he was in need! It was a mistake, he reflected, to confide in her about his troubles. It was a mistake! He provided her business advice (even though he has no business experience – except for non-starters) to which she took and then claimed publicly on Instagram that she had not asked for help.
After standing around for a little while at the front entrance, he decided to enter the landing. The first room was much more expansive and therefore daunting than it was previously when it was lit by the chandelier. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that the room was not filled with annoying teenagers this time. The ghastly presence of the brunette hovered above the right staircase, lingering in his peripheral vision but vanishing when he poured his concentration on that spot. He walked up the staircase in trepidation, hurrying after her like a whimpering child, unsure as to what he was exactly doing or why he was doing what he was doing. Every step was accompanied by sudden, lashing snaps against the windows above like claps of thunder – though it was not raining. An intense, anguishing longing drew him further on and on like a desperate, terrified child. The rug beneath his feet seemed to call him to the floor, beckoning him like a siren to lie and slumber in its velvety embrace.
Rod suspected, or rather, wished for it to be true, as he reflected on his half-finished projects, that he had an above average intelligence, perhaps even genius, which was strangely ignored, stamped on, perpetuated against by the authorities at large, and to which he was now suspecting was the reason he was still sane after everything that had happened to him in highschool, and this realisation revealed itself by way of slight smugness on his grisly features. If he had pondered on this a little further, he would have realised the extent to which his greater intelligence had protected him from the evils of normality which the world superimposes upon individuality, and that he still could make something of himself so as long as he directed his concentration to a productive end. But why did he not turn back now and make a fresh start? Now, if he saw anyone from his highschool in that corridor, in which he was descending at that moment, there would be no good and pleasant feeling within his heart – only bitterness and envy and resentment and bitterness. An overwhelming, shameful sensation swam in his gut like a quivering worm, hitting its tail against the cushy walls of the small intestine. It was not that he felt the resentment, the bitterness and the envy that he was so ashamed about, though that used to be the reason for his self-hatred, it was because he wanted revenge but could not guarantee it. His internal thoughts, those internal images, were mean. He could envision himself, shamefully of course, his coiled hands around his tormentors’ soft, white necks; all the while he would be justifying it in his head like a madman. Oh, how out of control his thoughts were! How could a woman put forth her heart to him when he himself was base and mean? How could he judge a woman for her choices when in his heart all he wanted was domination, vengeance, evil? If that woman in question had been there and said to him that he was a despicable man, he would not have objected to her accusations, would not have excused himself with such excuses as have been illustrated thus far. Something great was clawing at him from the inside, for the two sides of his brain felt as though they were on fire, as though the top of his head was like a cityscape and grisly fires had broken out on the west and east sides simultaneously. He had no perfect awareness of what was happening to him, and he was under no illusion that he had it all figured out as to what he was going to do, but strangely enough he felt confident that if he went back in time to highschool through the System that he would somehow figure it out on the strength of this burning intellect. In fact, he had felt this sensation before in a distant past, several times in fact in his youth, but it was this time that he was now conscious that this was not experienced by ordinary people.
“If I die now,” Rod swore to himself, “then it would all be for nothing.” A despairing notion swept over him like a terrible wind, screwing his expressions up as he thought contemptuously, “But I am past the age of Alexander the Great.” To an observer, he would have looked as though somebody had killed his best friend, for his face was lowered to the floor and he was walking miserably slow. He was filled with great, great shame. “I’m sorry,” he muttered suddenly after an intense concentration upon a distant memory of a girl, a particular girl – his first girlfriend – in fact, and how miserably he treated her, how devastating, how utterly scandalous was he to her that he was still to this day, ten years later, tormented and humiliated about it, waterboarded for it by constant flashes of the acute imagination. What was worst about it was that he could never go back and change how he treated that first woman, the woman that he dared not forget, though he was well past all obsessive romantic feeling for – only because of the woman in question now preoccupied his entire life, perhaps because of recency bias, but also because the woman who was his first girlfriend he could never contact again, for she did not want that, he thought with a perplexed brow... At first, he described the relationship as “toxic” and “a composite of damaged individuals”, but then he reframed it to himself and referred to it as “two people suffering”. That is how he thought of it now, and it was a little better in terms of the guilt he felt about how he acted towards her whilst in it, but there still lurked beneath his breast a desire to change that which could not be changed. “Oh,” he poured his face into his hands, remembering the acts he had done, the cringey sayings, the boundary-violations he had conducted unwittingly but desperately. Oh, he lamented that he was conscious!
Rod staggered forward, his crumpled feet dragging up the carpet all the way down the corridor. Soon enough, he was down in the basement which Lena had shown him an hour earlier. The massive data centre stood terrifyingly before him like the electric cityscape of Beijing, incessantly flashing fiery sparks of blue across the walls from the glittering computers.
As he leaned against the blue, illuminated wall, he found himself in the company of the past, tormented by the taunts of his former lover – rightfully deserved as he reminded himself; so much was the memory acute to him that he could see its audible manifestation clearly. That young, Polish woman, draped in long auburn hair, standing there dressed in all-black attire, holding in her long, white, slender fingertips an ashy cigarette. She stood by the small window at the other side of the room. He felt her presence inwardly like a small fire in his chest more than he could see her.
“You were a weirdo,” she said finally, looking over her shoulder at him in disgust with her big hazel eyes. She had a face like the moon.
He did not reply; he merely stared at her in disbelief, his heart sinking into a black hole. He suddenly started to shake rapidly like a man who had done wrong many moons ago and now had come face to face with its victim’s accusation.
The woman, though she was still a little girl in her head, sighed. “I really did try with you, you know.”
Confusion distorted his facial features. “What do you mean?” he muttered eventually, still not believing what he was seeing. He was surprised at the feeling emerging from inside him, surprised that he still had feelings in there – feelings of guilt, shame and regret.
“I was your first girlfriend, you know,” she said, before raising her eyes to the ceiling in thought. Her lips were half-parted, and they looked beautiful. “Remember when I tried to accommodate you?”
Suddenly he remembered: They were in a park together playing catch. He had asked her to play with him because he wanted to do something that wasn’t just walking around talking... That was boring he had told her plenty of times. He often got upset about that.
“I did try, then; you can’t fault me for not trying, can you?” she added.
“I... guess not.”
“Though you blamed me for everything.”
He didn’t say anything but stood as white and as cold as the ice outside on the streets. His mind was blank and slow and not at all like its usual self.
“As you think more of our time together, you can see that I did indeed try, right?”
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, his eyes unable to keep with hers. His stomach churned and he felt terribly sick. He shifted his gaze to the large electric adjustable bed beside her, drenched in lightning blue from the flickers of the supercomputers; connected to it was the System Lena had shown him earlier. His spine tingled at the spidery optic cables draped over the light blue bedding.
She stared at him for a moment, not saying anything. “I’ve moved on,” she exclaimed rather proudly after a while, biting into the cigarette and draining it of its ember like he did to her. “Had a baby, got married...”
Rod, trembling before her, fell to his knees because they could not take the sudden increase in weight from the guilt spilling into his guts from the dark, hidden crevices of his heart, which had up until now satisfactorily kept them from consciousness. His head was pressed to the floor, inches away from her feet, in a position he was very familiar with, as tears welled up in his scattering eyes. He caught her looking down at him by the way his back felt weighed down all of the sudden. His weariness tripled in intensity. “I still listen to Taylor Swift. Oh, I listened to her all the time after we stopped speaking. I listened to her in the car on long drives. I bought all her CD’s. I even joined the Taylor Swift society because I was so obsessed with it. You had such a profound effect on me. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s too late for that,” she replied coldly.
“Please,” he begged, a squeak in his voice, a breathlessness that could not be faked. His heart was thundering in his chest, and it felt like a thousand knives had been thrust into his soft, pudgy flesh.
She simply looked down at him with mixed feeling; a raised eyebrow.