Touch of doubt

Light above all

/*In which our hero is going to reveal his past...*/

Age 25, male, brown hair, comes from the middle class, but aspires to do something greater, brown eyes, funny looking guy, rarely smiles. I think that anyone looking at me walking down the street might describe what they see like that, but this description is flawed and for a good reason. They see only the exterior, forgetting that this is just a mask, a giant veil that hides another one and another.

Age 25, male, brown hair, nobody likes to see him, a good job, he is going to die alone, we love him anyway. Probably this is what my family sees and I cannot blame them, I do not make things easier for them. We rarely see each other now, usually during holidays.

I come from a quite large family, two brothers and a sister, and we definitely had to struggle a lot. Even back then I wasn't able to understand that morbid desire of people to have as many children as possible, it seemed to me like a total waste of money and energy. I was the second child born, two years after my sister and the other brothers of mine are twins born at one year and two months after me. My mother was a simple women, she worked at one of those coal fired power plants for little money. I watched her for years trading her time and health for just some pieces of paper. My father was a beast. He reached the point he was no longer a human being. You could find him everyday at the cheapest bar in our town drinking and smoking. No one knows how did he manage to bring money at home every night. I think that this was one of the reason my mother never left him, even though along with money he was also bringing anger and his only way of coping with it was to hit me and my brothers. By not hitting women he saw himself as some kind of gentlemen, a men of honor. I do not hate him for that, I rather take pity on him.

All of my life I saw people surviving. There are very few whose lives really matter. I spent the most part of my adolescence trying to figure out what do I have to do in order to live. I always said to myself that my life is going to mean something and that I will do great things that will be remembered by everybody. It's very hard when you just slam into the wall of reality. Seeing all of your dreams shatter in thousands of pieces and then become sand which you grab and then let it slip between you fingers. As I've said before, there are very few people who matter and I came to realize I am not going to be one of them. I took the sand from my dreams and I added water. I built a castle in which I planned to hide myself and never let anybody enter. It was dark in there and the darkness soon started to eat me. At the age of seventeen I was diagnosed with severe depression and social anxiety. All of my family thought I was possessed by demons and called the priest in our town to kill them. He failed.

Besides high school I refused to go out. This is the period me and my family realized that we come from different worlds and besides our name, we have nothing in common. This is also the time she came into my life. She was new in our school and when I saw her I knew she was different. We were like water and fire. She was exactly the opposite of me; always smiling, laughing, she could talk to anybody, she was so happy. The time I saw her for the first time she was lost and asked me for directions to her class. Even tough I felt she was different I couldn't let her into my life so I just pointed at the right door. It was only six months later I began talking with her, or to be more specific she talked to me and I responded. I was mystified by the fact that she didn't live her life on autopilot like others. She was the one with whom I may talk and not feel like coming from another world. I accepted the fact that she was not attracted by me, even tough I had and also told her about my feelings for her. I saw her going in and out of relationships and I was always there to comfort her. I realized the fragile nature of humans. We are fascinated be new, shiny things that are too far for us to reach, so we try to climb, but the more we go up, the more we see that the shiny thing starts to rust and we are able to pick it up we understand that we never really wanted that and let ourselves fall to the ground. After all I am human too and this is the reason why I opened the gates of my castle for her, why I accepted her into my life.

Everything was going a bit better for me, but it was to be expected that it was not going to last. Now I was in the second year of college in the capital and I thought I was lucky that she also attended this college. This girl I am talking about, soon found the love of her life, another one. But this one was annoyed by the fact that she used to spend a lot of time with me so he made her choose between us. She chose him and they moved to a new city where he was offered a well-paid job. When she left, she gave me her address and also told me to call her. I never did.

For a few weeks I felt empty. I felt alone. I somehow managed to look back and I saw that my castle, my fortress of solitude was not there anymore. There was only sand. It wasn't melancholia which kicked in then, it was anger. That was the last time I've looked at my past aspirations. I needed to do something different.

At that time I was studying to become a professional programmer so I tried to use that in my advantage. I worked a lot on ways to make software more secure, but all of this proven to be just time which I am never going to get back. I finished college without any kind of relationship, but I was appreciated by professors. One of them talked to the director of a bank and he gave me a job. It is the same bank I am working for right now.

Right now I am driving to Balthazar, my landlord, in order to tell him about my problem with the ceiling, but my mind is going some other places. I am thinking about giving up on the pills that my psychiatrist gave me. I feel somewhat dizzy and unable to focus because of those things. He said that they will help me with the voice I am always hearing. A voice that tells awful things about me, the voice we all hear from time to time and we like to call it doubt. For me tough, the voice is as real as yours or as anyone else's. I do not feel the voice, I can hear it and I can ask questions and it will respond to them.

"I am out of focus again!", I say to myself. I need to be careful while driving, I can't allow my mind wander like that.

Then it was silence. Only an unbelievable bright light was surrounding me.

/*This my longest chapter yet and I feel like it is going to be pretty hard to read it. I just hope you enjoy it and please provide me your feedback. Don't be afraid to point out any kind of mistake or flaw, I am willing to learn.*/