The vanishing

1. A different guy

She never understood why I was different. Maybe I never found the right words, but in seven years, I can't believe that she wasn't able to extrapolate and figure me out by herself. It always ended the same way, she, telling me that I was narcissist, me telling her that she really doesn't know what she was talking about... classic. I've been single for 9 months now and it feels great to be alone. To not have to explain myself each and every time I get back late at night.

I've always been different from my friends. In my early infancy, I remember feeling the world around me, I remember my mind merging with my surrounding. You would say that a wall doesn't have much to say and you would be mostly right, but the residual energy from previous visitors, from my parent having sex in the room beside mine, of my father fighting over the phone with his uncle. You won't believe me, but I could feel the residue of all this inside the wall. A little bit of fear, anger, excitement and a whole lot of lead painting and wood sealant too! One day, I must have been something like 9 years old, my mind entered the wall as usual, but this time, I was able to dig deeper and access the dying essence of the wood that was used to build my house. It was faint, I must have been in very good shape this day, I was able to feel the forest, the breeze and for a brief moment, I felt birds and small animals memories, twisting in my brain, fast and shallow. It was awesome!

You understand? You've been reading for two paragraphs and you already get a feel that I'm different, why was Sarah unable to accept this in seven years?

I succeeded in creating a pretty ordinary life that some of my friends even call boring. I'm a computer scientist for crowdtective.com, a crowd-sourced detective service that is slowly getting some traction. It's not my idea, but I'm glad I'm there. I'm not the entrepreneur type, I need my pay check every week. Working for this startup was a big move for me, having worked for an insurance company for the pst 15 years. Financial security has always been important for me, which explains why I have a relatively boring job for my talents. I could have been a wonderful mentalist, someone able to magically understand your deepest secrets or being able to find out your preferred ice cream flavour, but I'm too shy for this life. Having been always different forced me to keep to myself, to avoid being discovered and this shaped my personality as I grew up.

I've always accepted my difference and my capacities, but never really exploited them. Ok, I've tried to impress a few girls here and there and used a few tricks to improve my sex performance, but I've never tried to understand these skills. But for the past 6 months, I've spent most of my nights exploring and researching on my capacities and I must admit that I'm pretty excited. Not excited enough to leave my day job, but I discovered a few interesting tricks that might be useful in specific circumstances.

I guess that you don't believe in magic? I say this because we all learn pretty soon that magic exists only in movies or in fantasy books. I can't really talk about magic even today, but I can tell you that there are forces around us that we don't perceive and don't understand and that some special individuals, very sensitive to their environment, are able to access these energies and bring them in our universe. This is what I've been studying for the past 6 month, how to use my hyper-sensibility to access some of this energy and harness it to fuel some very neat tricks. I know, a 38 years old programmer, spending all his nights alone in his basement, exploring magical energy might sound quit nerd, but I'm not playing some video games, it's happening for real!

-- Bing!

Sorry for the interruption, it's my mailbox. I know, it's not really polite to read his emails while talking to someone, but this is from my crowdtective.com account. I actually use our detective platform to test if it's working well and also to use my special skills in certain low-profile investigations. For the past week, I've been focusing my effort on a strange missing person's case. Ms Coriolis, an elderly woman from the suburb has disappeared last week, during the night. She lives in a residence where nurses make sure they get their drugs before they go to sleep. Based on the testimonials from the service nurse Sunday night, Ms Coriolis was put to bed at 8 o'clock and was not there the next morning. Window closed, no visitors and no, I hear your thoughts, she's not in the closet, someone already pointed this in our platform! Where could she be? Poor Ms Coriolis. Not that I know her and from what I can tell, she seemed to be an old angry woman, but nonetheless, utterly disappearing during one's sleep is a good way to attract sympathy!