Leroy Adkins is an underperformer. He barely graduated. He barely got a job, and he hardly socializes in his day-to-day life.
Zachary Turner has been sick for as long as he can remember, and as he grows older the crushing realization that he never...
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Zachary hadn't realized it was his birthday until his sister had called him in a frenzy that morning on a video call. She'd apologized profusely, saying how much she hated she was still out of town on this important day that he turned thirty.
Thirty.
Zachary zoned his sister out for most of the call, continuously repeating that word back to himself. It didn't feel real. He didn't feel like he was thirty.
Somehow, that was too adult. Too old to be in his predicament of living with his younger sister so that the government wouldn't withdraw his disability benefits. Too old to not have had any proper job for more than a few months at a time, and definitely too old to not have any romantic or interpersonal affairs.
Zachary did not feel like he was thirty.
Not one bit.
After the call, he had spent most of his days reading, or taking care of the cats. He had about four that consistently stayed in the house and eight or so more that came in occasionally and would disappear for weeks at a time. He hadn't gotten any of these cats himself. They were strays that had wandered into the property and had taken a liking to him because he would give them cat food and the occasional fish and beef scraps. Zachary loved them because most of the time they were his only company. His elder sister had a long-distance relationship, and after getting work remotely she often spent weeks at a time at a boyfriend's place in Montana.
It was lonely, but Zachary mostly shrugged it off, it wasn't like most of his life had been any different. He'd grown up being flat-out ignored or bullied. His chronic pain gave him a lot of anxiety about physical activity and interacting with other children. And even now that he was much older and diagnosed and he was content in knowing that he had not imagined his pain, there was still a little part of him that felt less than for not walking when he could, going out by himself for long hours or even being on disability financial aid in the first place.
There was something about chorionic pain that made him feel constantly gaslighted. His diagnosis list was long and growing longer, and his pain wasn't a visible physical ailment that was obvious and indisputable. His mum had constantly hounded him as a child for always 'feeling sick', 'feeling tired', and 'feeling pain.' And that vocabulary had been glued down at the back of his mind. He found himself always second-guessing his own pain. Wondering if it was him just overreacting, and simply 'feeling' too much and not simply being in pain.
His illness made him 'bothersome', and the fact that it wasn't written on his face like an accident wound or an amputation made pity for him scarce. He avoided getting out of his wheelchair in public for fear that someone would heckle him for faking. He'd seen multiple compilations on YouTube of such incidents. He was also aware that some people made it their full-time hobby to attack and discredit people with non-visible disabilities on the internet, so he avoided an internet presence, hence maybe the one space he would have felt comfortable connecting with other people.
