love, read, write

Eddie looked off into the distance. "I don't know." She sighed. "It's always been like that."

I didn't know what to say. "I'm sorry about all that."

Several leaves danced in front of us in a colorful waltz. I shivered from the cold. I could feel the icy metal of the bench through my jeans.

"You know, my name wasn't always Eddie."

"Oh, yeah? When did you decide on Eddie?"

"No, like--"

A dog owner and his dog jogged past us. He looked pretty content about his life.

"It's just. My parents."

"Your parents? They made you call yourself Eddie?"

"No, well. I chose that name myself. Nickname, I mean." She paused. "I mean, my name is actually Edward."

"Oh," I said. "Edward."

Eddie laughed. "Yeah, I know. I don't know why they chose it either. When I was twelve, too."

"What?"

"Look," Eddie turned to me. "There's just things I can't explain. My parents weren't very... normal. I didn't know that then. I thought names weren't permanent things. I never lived in places long enough to realize that nobody changed their names every two years. I never... I never got to stay. I never got to build myself up."

I rubbed my nose because there was nothing to do, but immediately regretted it upon feeling the chilly wind bite my exposed fingers.

"I see," I said slowly.

She looked at me in a strange way. To this day I can never explain that look. It was a rare expression.

"You don't have to say that, you know." She sighed, then shrugged. We sat in silence for a bit.

"I feel--I feel like I'm saying too much--"

"No, no," I said. "It's good that you're talking. It's good. To um, build yourself up."

"Yeah." She bit her lips. "Yeah."

Silence.

"You know," she turned to me. "I think everything about who I am is... is because of my parents. Or everything about who I am not."

"They do seem like an interesting bunch," I said.

"Interesting, yeah." She smiled weakly, her eyes searching desperately around the park for something to distract herself with. It was excruciatingly calm.

"You know I had five names before Eddie? And I lived the first two years of my life without one. They refused to give one. I was named 'Baby' for two years. That was my name on my birth certificate.

"And they never let me in on the names, either. They always decided. They had all this money, from god knows where. Ellen--my mom--said she inherited a ton. And so did Phil."

"Phil's your dad?"

"Yeah. Never call them by their titles or whatever. They were never really a mom or dad to me, anyways. They were so lost and indecisive about themselves that when they had me, they couldn't bear to be decisive for the sake of this poor living soul. I inherited all of their insecurities."

"They changed your name because they were indecisive?"

"Well, I mean. They thought it was cool. That it would make me a more creative person or something. They had the connections and the money. Legal issues aren't too big of a deal if you have a lot of money and know a lot of people, you know. I grew up with everything like that.

"But I guess I also grew up with nothing."

She wiped her eyes. I didn't know what to say. So I didn't.

We stayed like that, sitting on the bench, looking out at the quiet lake. The water was calm. I felt calm, but unsettled.

"Let's go inside," I said eventually. "They might be waiting for us."

function breathe(){
    air. oxygen. how could it
    seem so easy;
    inhale(problems);
}

function inhale(it){
    it isn’t.
    exhale(thoughts);
}

function exhale(it){
    it is composure;
    i watch it leave out the
    window because my heart
    beats too fast for fears that exist();
}

function exist(){
    return false;
    they don’t.
}

a series; will continue.



In silence, I contemplated the importance of having ten fingers. Was ten really necessary for a comfortable life? I stared at the extensions from my palm and wiggled them curiously, watching the bones bend and fold at my command. How easy it seems that we have ten. But how much easier would it be, then, to have eleven? How much less at eight? I assumed it was all just about social norms--about not having to be stared at strangely when one has an extra finger.

x

I always knew I was different. Well, let me rephrase that: I thought I was different.

No, that's not quite it, either. The former makes it seem as if some future event ascertained my difference; the latter makes it seem as if my assumption was grounded in falsehood. Neither is true. I thought I was different, and continue to believe so. Nothing to date has ascertained nor disproved this theory. I simply feel this way very intensely.

Nothing ever seems to come easily. The way I see the world, I like to think, is different in color and taste from the average human. Perhaps it is my inner Darwinistic hunger. The will to survive, to remain. To be remembered. Death is a scary thing even to me now, after all of the things I've been through. It is true that I like to believe that I will do great things that will leave a mark, so that my life here will not mean nothing. After all, we simply exist and then leave. Our ashes soon turn into air molecules that people swallow and cough up, or that animals swallow (which then are consumed by humans or other animals, then pooped out). I shall become nothing but a part of the great recycling bin of life. In millions of years an atom from my arm may be in the dinner meal of a bear king's raccoon maid.

And who knows if some atom in me was once an atom that belonged to a great ancient King from Egypt. It may just as well be the origin of my internal illusions of greatness and destiny.

I presume it's easy to say that one does not belong where one is; that one actually deserves better but that the circumstances were misfortunate. It is true that we are mere victims of our circumstances; there is nothing to respect of a child of royalty other than that it had immense luck being born into a powerful and rich family. Nothing more to look at a poor child in disdain. The child, and all subsequent events in the child's life, is never truly the child's fault. If it knew of the horrid life it would inevitably live, would it really have chosen to be born in between dirty rags and under a tattered roof?

But really--I was never meant to end up here. I was different. I believe so. I had thoughts unlike any other; rarely did I come across people who had similar minds as me. I did meet someone once, as I was waiting in line for a book signing. Later on I found out that he was working on some sort of revolutionary novel of sorts. It became famous, and marked as his magnum opus. He gained a wikipedia page and several articles, one on Huffington Post and a vague mention in a New York Times article. He later got addicted to cocaine and went to jail for trying to smuggle an assortment of drugs into the United States by tying packets onto their underbellies.

It seems that my greatness was forgotten by the gods (or God, whomever the majesty is). I skipped all wikipedia articles and went straight to infamy. Unsung infamy. It seems nobody thought it decent to at least make me known for the things I may go to hell for.

x

To set things straight, I was never a humanitarian. I spoke and felt as a humanitarian. I certainly believed in humanitarian ideals, and thought that social justice was very important for society (quite self-explanatory, I tried to explain to others). The people around me believed I was a strong believer in humanitarian causes and called me a sort of servant to society. But I was never truly humanitarian.

Within my heart, my morals were never quite set in stone. While I believed strongly that the poor should be helped, I often contemplated the necessity of human deaths, and the idea of torture. I was masochistic from a young age. I never dared to act it out - I lived a long twenty five years as a model human - but inside, I thought of images and scenarios that repulsed me. It was in my mind; it served no purpose than to cause the effects it had on myself. Pure disgust.

Often I dared myself to think of gruesome images of people I loved (or that I thought I loved). My mother, cut in two. Or the idea of using the knife I was holding (to chop carrots) to slice an arm of mine off.

The ideas were fleeting. I was viewed as a humanitarian. I still do believe that we ought to save the world from its injustices. I still cry when I think about poor children starving, or about orphans, or women who live their lives oppressed and abused.

x

There was no turning point. Turning points, in their entirety, are misleading. No human simply turns around and walks in the opposite direction. Gradual is the only type of path we know. And such was my change.

It wasn't even a change, really. It simply happened. At the time, it felt natural. Nothing really had changed; I had simply decided to do something other than what I had been usually doing. It was nothing out of the ordinary to me, as I was fully aware of my internal thoughts and the paths they had traveled in the years previous. Perhaps to others, it seemed like a full turning point.

(There were no others, though.)

x

Another thing I must make clear is that I never believed in the idea of impossibility. Nothing, in its own right, is impossible. It simply has not been done. Or it has been done, far off, millions of miles away. Or it has been done in another dimension. There is no guarantee that everything we see now is the only thing that exists for all of eternity, in all forms of existence there may be. It is simply ridiculous. Simply because we have not witnessed something, is it really worthy of the ugly label, "Impossible"?

People warn others not to jump to conclusions, but they have no idea of the biggest conclusion to which they have jumped.

x

When an advertisement arrived in the mail, I never thought it was any more strange than an offer to go to the Bahamas. Both were equally preposterous and strange. One appealed to me more.

It was titled "Night Errands." On a deep purple and glossy paper was the matte, gold cursive font. The end of the s seemed to travel on for eons before it touched the edge of the paper. Heavy weight paper. It boasted high monetary awards for those who ran errands for clients who needed it but didn't have the time or the capability. A company of errand boys.

My first mistake was in leaving that ad on my table and throwing the rest away.