Flashes Of Light

Past - Logar

The Anti told me I had to stay in a little room all by myself.

I hated doing what other people told me to do, but ever since I accepted to be his Visionary, and he gave my Dad a promotion, the unspoken pact between us was that he would talk, and I would try my best to listen.

Being left all alone in that clean, dry white room that reminded me of the room I had in the hospital made me lose my shit, so I found a wrap-a-pill in a pocket of my black trousers and spent the next remaining forty-five minutes making funny faces at myself in the mirror.

As a kid, when I wanted to lose myself in my thoughts, I took a mango flavoured wrap-a-pill (the one they used to give dogs, but recently they have been commissioned for the lowest member of the human race as well. They don't keep your stomach empty and they get you high) and laid on the cement outside my house pretending I was in my garden.

I remember that one day the heat almost killed me. I passed out because I had too little to eat. Story of my childhood. That day, my father was particularly upset, so he beat me up. I learnt my lesson and I never did it again.

It suddenly occurred to me that I didn't always enjoy being ugly. Of course, one day during my adolescence, the idea was bestowed upon my brain by some kind of cosmic force: if you are ugly, you are free. No one to tell you what to wear, what to not do to your hair, no one at your mother's funeral who feels some kind of first-hand embarrassing pity for you, like 'look at that poor little kid, so cute, and an orphan already.'

Maybe I am overreacting with the funeral thing, everyone wants to be pretty at weddings and funerals. But generally, being ugly is a virtue. You can focus on the things that matter.

I didn't always think this way. When I first went through puberty, I hated that I just didn't look good. I had long, white limbs, bad skin, bad teeth and generally speaking I wasn't the picture of health. I had fluffy reddish hair and people always told me I was cute. My father had vintage books with pictures of elves and fairies, and told me I looked like them (my father was Scottish, so he loved his folklore) but it wasn't interesting to me. I wasn't going for the King of the Fairies look.

I wanted to be handsome, and I just wasn't.

I clearly recalled thinking that even boys like me deserved a little love, and all those cringy Disney clichés you get only if you're good looking. But, back then in front of the mirror, I had a lot of time to think about it, and decided all of those kinds of things are not so cringy if you're the one who finds them. The losers always want to feel like the winners.

I hated physical contact and the idea of forming a relationship with anyone had always been very far from my mind, so I never asked anyone to hang out.

With a father like mine, even in a year like 2053 I was still a little ashamed to be interested in all genders. And it wasn't only that. I used to imagine a good-looking person who would come to me and tell me...

Well, something. And something nice, not something like, "You're what happens when the devil fucks a scarecrow."

Or something along those lines, you get the idea. I think I masturbated, once or twice, but it was as far as I could go.

"Until?"

It suddenly looked to me as if somebody had asked a question. Maybe it was myself, in the mirror.

"Until," I said. "One day, approximately one year ago, I felt very sick and tired of the idea of being a virgin. I thought it had to represent you, in some way, you know. I didn't want to identify as a virgin, it was a flag I was not going forward to carry. So, I asked one boy after the women's soccer game to come hang around with me, and I tried to make it clear how the situation was.