Little Lion Man (Unofficial Title)

All Rights Reserved

Chapter 1

I didn’t care enough to be anyone, but I cared too much to be no one at all.  I don’t know when it all started - the caring and the not caring.  One morning I woke up and realized I had been like this for years.  Nothing horrible had happened to make me this way; there was no great story of hardship or bold suffering that justified my cynicism.  In fact, it seemed like nothing had happened to me at all.  Maybe that was the problem; when nothing happens for long enough, it becomes something.

My name is Eoin Baylis, and to any casual observer, I would appear to be a normal ninteen-year-old Irish teenager.  I have short, ginger-blond hair, and blue eyes that look more like fog than the ocean.  I’m tall, about 6 foot, with lanky legs and broad shoulders.  In my small town of coastal Ireland, everyone knows everyone.  Somehow, though, I always feel alone.

I wasn’t born cynical, but it sure felt that way.  I mean, sure, I always had the story of my dad leaving as an excuse for the way I acted, but he had left my mum and I when I was just a kid, and it had never affected me too badly.  I had never really known him, and besides, my mum was enough for me.  We got along perfectly - well, until I screwed things up, which happened more often than either of us liked.

I can’t even remember when I started drinking.  It was well before I turned eighteen, that was for sure.  The local bartender knew I was a ‘good kid’ so he slipped me a few drinks under the table.  Then more, and more.  You know how people say both drinking and smoking together is the most likely way to get yourself killed?  Well, I must have been eager to die.  I was almost as addicted to cigarettes as alcohol.

None of that was the worst of it, though.  Not by a long stretch.  All of that was just how I combated the worst of it.  The smoking and the drinking, the rebelling, even the good things, like my music, were all a way to try to break out - to break out of the incredible hole of nothingness I had bored myself into.  The worst of it was...nothing.

Demons dance in my dreams

This is the end of all things

Or so it feels

As I tear out my mind and ask for one thing

Dreams that stay a dream

I cursed and dropped my pen, rubbing my eyes with ink-stained, callused hands. The song was horrible.  I glanced at the clock. 3:00am. Two hours to go.

“Two hours.”  I whispered under my breath. “Could you not bloody sleep for two hours?”

But I knew I couldn’t.  I hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep for as long as I could remember.  Maybe that explained why I was insane.  Or maybe this was just a side effect of insanity.  Either way, it sure made things difficult.

I reached out to grab hold of the bottle of beer sitting on my desk, and brought it to my lips.  With an angry grunt I set it down.  Empty.  On top of everything else, the beer was gone.

With a sigh, I stood up, swearing as I stumbled into the corner of my bed.  This was a repeating occurrence for me.  My room was small, sitting on the top floor of an old, creaky, wooden house that had been sitting in the same small plot of land for over a hundred years.  In one corner, by the window, stood my desk.  If I drew the curtain back, I could see the most of our little village from the hill our house stood on.  Beside the desk was an old set of drawers that held all of my personal belongings, besides those that were in my desk and strewn on the floor.  On the other side of the desk was a queen-sized bed which was far too large for the rest room.  Nearly every time I stood up, I banged one part of my body or another on the bed frame, usually my knee, because of its height, but every limb, digit, and joint had had its turn.  On the other side of the bed, cradled in the corner of the safest side of the room stood my guitar.  This is what I was standing to get.