Cyber Hobo

Okay, prepare for another whine fest about my pathetic life, just skip it if you don’t care.

Okay, so, I was laying in bed this morning, watching the beam of light that had broken through my curtain as it made it’s way up the duvet towards my face. It was mesmerizing in a way, this intangible beam creeping up the bed, biding it’s time until it could blind me when I was too weak and lethargic to move my damn head. It made me realise something, I am so far beyond caring that it’s scary.

My life, while fairly comfortable, is completely devoid of anything that means anything. I had all these big dreams at one point. Grand visions of being some famous writer, sitting in cafe’s in Europe with my laptop in front of me, sipping on expensive coffee and smiling politely at all the people around me as my fingers tapped out a tale to enthrall minds and capture hearts. I imagined owning a big house full of bookshelves, bookshelves stuffed with expensive first edition books, a house that my dearest friends would visit all the time.

For the last two years there was someone else in that picture. An amazing woman that was my wife and confidant, a woman who shared all of my strange little ways. As you know, if you’ve read… any of my previous posts, I lost this woman recently… and my life came crashing down around me. That carefully woven lie I had told myself came crashing down around me, leaving me to pick through the broken shards of my dreams with my bare hands.

Still, while she was the catalyst for this… destruction, she is not the sole cause of it, as much as I would like to imagine otherwise. My life is empty… because I let it get like that, because I lived in my head for so long that I forgot to make an effort to change it into something I could be proud of. Now though, I’ve had my eyes forced open, whether I liked it or not… and I most assuredly didn’t like it. No, now that I’ve realised just how humdrum and boring real life is, I find that I can’t even manage to muster one iota of interest in it.

I used to be a lot of things. I used to be a dreamer, a hopeless romantic, and even, though this may come as a shock to those of you that knew me, an optimist. Yeah, I put on this… stupid facade of pessimism in order to avoid anyone seeing the soft squishy side of me sticking a knife in. I even managed to fool myself, but the fact remains, I was always optimistic, it’s a bit hard to be a dreamer and a hopeless romantic without being an optimist, quite frankly. I was always looking for some great love story to be a part of, always looking for some magical world that would let me in, always being… pretty damn sure that if I stuck with it long enough I’d get those things.

But the truth is… there are no happy endings, there are no real romances, there is no true love, there is no magic in the world. All of the things I always hoped for, dreamed about, wished for… none of it is real. Which… pretty much makes my entire life a lie, a horrible, deluded lie. I’m… not an attractive man, look at the photos to the right and you’ll see. All I’ve got to offer anyone is… a sense of humour (Dry), a… love of good movies and good books and… well, that’s about it really.

As you can see, I’ve got nothing to offer anyone. I’m sure that… for all the pretty people, the beautiful people, there are happy endings, there is magic, but not for people like me, not for ugly, boring men… without a lot of money. See, I realised early on that I was not “One of those people”. Or, rather, I had that fact ground into me ruthlessly by the ones that -were- those people. Hell, I wasn’t even really fat back then, just a bit chubby, puppy fat at the best, I’m sure you don’t believe me but… there it is.

Of course, kids are cruel little bastards and they never really let me forget that I wasn’t stick thin like them. It didn’t really phase me at first, I had some pretty amazing support at home, so I didn’t really care what the other kids said about me, that didn’t last though, not past the inevitable advent of the “Girls arn’t icky anymore” point. That’s when I really did start to eat, I suppose at some point I figured… If they already see me as fat, what’s the point of watching what I eat? And what was once puppy fat turned into… well, fat.

So, that’s the point where that horrible little “Play” began. I say play because it was all an act, it’s all just acting. You put on the unmovable mask of “The Jolly Fat Man” you make yourself funny, you make fun of yourself… it’s all a defensive measure of course, you pretend that none of the razor sharp little remarks don’t cut you to the bone, when they really do. At first, it’s just that… an act… but before you know it, it’s all too real.

You’ve changed, you’ve become the mask that you put on… except, you’re not really jolly, not deep down, you’re still acting but you can’t stop anymore. The really sad part though? Beneath that facade there’s a whole lot of construction going on, you’re building walls around your heart, propping up your emotions, trying your damnedest to make everything secure so that one day, you’ll be able to take off that mask… but you never do, by this point your self confidence is so low that you can’t find it with a big shovel and a lot of sweat and… you just don’t have it in you to slip it off anymore. Or, or… you somehow find out the courage to do it… I did… but that doesn’t make things any better… any better at all.

No, in actual fact, it makes things a lot worse. Cause now, you’re not the jolly fat man anymore, the one people can laugh at, the one that makes fun of himself in order to be liked. No, now you’re just… the fat man, usually surly, shy, awkward and… woefully jaded.

I built up so many walls around my heart that I just couldn’t function in normal society. It’s incredibly hard to open up to anyone at all when you’re scared stiff that you’re gonna be hurt. Under it all though, I was still that dreamer, that romantic, searching for someone to share my heart with. Inevitably though, I was shot down again and again, I was still naive, hopeful, I still believed that if I was persistent and showed people that I was friendly and a really nice guy, someone would look past the… fat.

It didn’t happen though, nobody could see past that. I… can’t even remember how many times I opened up a little crack in my heart and showed some girl… and then had her laugh and make a nice, deep slice before walking away. The worst though… was opening up quite fully and telling someone how I felt, having her accept, then… refusing to so much as hold my hand… only to find out that… the only reason she agreed to go out with me was because she was actually interested in one of my best friends and just… didn’t want to hurt my feelings… Yeah, because my feelings would be so much better off when I eventually found out. Well, I did… and it hurt even worse… So thanks for that.

Even after all that though, I was still that dreamer, that… hopeless romantic, that… optimist. Sure, I’d… developed a lot of resentment towards women as a whole, resentment that I buried pretty deep and forgot about, but I surfaced on the other side… beaten but… a lot more whole than I should have been.

It took… not a whole plethora of women,  not a whole slew of rejections to kill that side of me, it took… one woman… one mistake… one monumental fuckup to do that. It took… watching her walk away to do that. So, like I said, she wasn’t the one that caused this destruction, but… she was the catalyst for it. I did something I never should have done… I let her in, I believed her when she promised she’d never leave, I listened when she said she’d stick with me forever. I was a fool, I let my guard down… more fully than I’ve ever done before… and she didn’t just add another scar to my heart, she cut it out and showed it to me, Temple of Doom style.

So, there we go, the whole sad story of why I am… now… completely empty inside. Why I am no longer that dreamer, that… hopeless romantic, why I am dead inside. The funny thing though? Even though I realise all this, I can’t do a damned thing about it. I don’t know how, I don’t have the strength to change myself again… So what do I do?

*Shrugs* Fuck if I know. Maybe one of you does though, assuming that anyone actually reads this crap, so if you have any suggestions, let me have it.