Hear me out.
I don’t plan to stay here long. One way or another, this place won’t hold me. Yeah, sure – I know ‘they all’ say that. But trust me – I’m different. No, that’s not right – I’m probably bog-standard, but the circumstances are different. And the circumstances are going to make things a little difficult. Unless I tell someone – even if I tell someone.
Since I was a little boy, I’ve had a problem. The doctors call it kleptomania, to me it’s a challenge. Not a challenge like the kind you see in the big budget block-busters, the one where the suave gentleman spy gets the girl, a fortune, and the respect of the people he’s stolen from.
It’s a challenge to reign myself in. A challenge to try to keep myself from taking something, anything – and a challenge I always inevitably lose.
First memory I have is when I was six. My parents were in this store, a resteraunt or something. There were a bunch of pastries, fresh and flaky and delicious behind the counter. Glazed with honey, and chocolate, and maple syrup that looked like it’d be taken from a broken and unresisting tree.
The server was a nice lady. She saw my smile and the innocent look in my blue eyes, and I remember her saying from rosy red lipstick that couldn’t hide last nights bruises that she wanted to give me an extra little gift, for free.
And while she and my parents were talking, I helped myself to several from inside the display case, shoving them crudely into my pockets.
I never ate them, just felt nervous and nauseous and thrilled.
Somehow, my parents never found out. They found out much later, and my father got so angry that his face swelled up like a big old balloon. He yelled and shouted himself hoarse, telling me to never steal again and – yeah, you’re right. None of it’s important now. Even if I’d wanted to, which I did… I couldn’t.
Guess my self-control is pretty crap, huh?.. Just joking with myself, it’s why I’m laughing.
Over time, I moved out and moved on with life. Got a good car, a good job. But my habits never changed. I moved on from stealing odd trinkets from school and work, to walking around town. Finding houses where the people who lived in ‘em were too lost, and too self-absorbed. I’d wait, sometimes for weeks – watching them, figuring out if they were out.
And I’d bide my time, fighting the impulse until it was screaming into my ear – and then, then I’d go into my mark and take something.
Didn’t matter what. Maybe a piece of jewelry, maybe a book fallen from the shelf. I tried to avoid valuable things that looked like they’d be easily noticed or have sentimental value. I just needed proof – something I could shove in a drawer and mark as a sign that I’d been there. And then my little secret wouldn’t try to tempt me at coming back again. It’d be over, and under control – for at least a little while.
They don’t tell you that it means living alone, that it means avoiding other people but being charming enough that people think everything is all right. Sure, I could’ve talked to a doctor about it; maybe they’d even have been able to help, with words or drugs or medicine or something – but the voice whispered to me first and foremost, and it was seductive.
All I needed to be happy and to live – was to keep on taking all the little things that it wanted. And so it asked, and so I did.
But there was this one house that’d never really called to me. It’d been old, renovated a few times – failed to sell on the market. A young couple moved in, looking like they had too much money and not enough common sense.
With them, they brought their little daughter. Not even a year old…
I watched them go out, eating at fancy resteraunts at least once or twice a week. The new car the guy bought and lavished more time and energy on then his wife and kid combined – the sallow way each talked only about themself at the table, raising their voice ever so slightly in a kind of verbal fencing match nobody ever one.
