The Patron Saint of Losing Sleep

That my life is not a sure and set thing, nor is it stable. In college you can never depend on people saying nice things about you all the time, and if you happen to have some dark things resting in your past, be assured that they will be dragged back out to be converted into weapons against you. No matter how quiet I am and how much I try to avoid explaining my past, there will always be an aggressor pushing the issues into my spine when I turn my back on them, and raising the public against me when all I want is to be left alone. I have always been the peacekeeper, the voice of reason and caution, and yet my name is used to incite discord and war. However, I am not absolved of responsibility or blame, as the mistakes I have made, however well contained and quiet, were still not completely handled properly. I guess when you encounter something no one has ever encountered before, it is almost a certainty you won’t make it through without a hitch, and those who saw me through said I took it in stride. Now I have other compartments of my life to manage. Hopefully they will go even more smoothly when I set them straight.

Lemme tell you a few things about my childhood. When I was in elementary school, every teacher I ever had put me in a desk away from everyone else sitting in the corner. This is how it was for six years. They didn’t even know what to do with me back then. This tagged me as an individual from the very beginning, and when middle school and high school rolled around, the trend created in my early years with my peers carried on, and I continued to be regarded in everything at arms length. Some kids went to alps. I on the other hand was left to my own devices, and ultimately I am better off for it. In high school I was simultaneously no one and everyone, included and isolated, and this made my vantage point vast, and my influence wide. I had no close friends, nobody to reveal my true motives, and when all was said and done high school very truly bored me. Now I’m a college student, still incredibly bored, but I’ve found kindred spirits. Other persons of my unique calibre to take the edge off of the vast boredom I find myself adrift upon. Valley Forge High was not my home, it’s people were not my people, and apart from a select few individuals and brilliant teachers, there is nothing there for me to go back to. I am Parma city schools’ unwanted son, so be it. The irony of the machine that created me is that I will turn it’s same neglect back upon it to tear it down, but not before it made me what I am, which to my surprise is a man well adapted to the world I currently find myself in. And before you recite the line about pride and the fall, let me tell you that I have already fallen, and my pride is still here.

It’s funny, up until now, I had always thought that what I looked for in a girl was independence and a strong will. However, after an inebriated conversation with a friend last night, I have come to realize that it isn’t really independence that I’ve been searching for all this time. You see, I have always taken pride in my ability to put aside my desires and give a girl exactly what she wants. It seems that I am hard wired to do so, and I am never happy until the one I care for most is happy. Now at the same time, I value aggression in a girl, and look for someone with a strong sense of will and a need to take control of a situation. If this is not the case, I am almost certain a relationship will not work out. During the course of my explanation It suddenly clicked. I’ve been looking for a girl that will fight my will not because she herself is strong, though it is an indicator that she is strong anyway, but because if she wanted to oppose me she would mainly be opposing my first priority: to give her whatever she wants. A willingness to fight me in any situation would take the opposite side of my ultimate goal of making her happy, meaning that it was never a strong willed individual I was looking for at all. I’ve been looking for someone with as much a compulsion to fulfill my needs as I have to fulfill hers. I need a girl that wants to do for me as much as I am willing to do for her. And that is what ultimately makes a girl special to me.

It is strange for me to think that I am now in my early twenties, still in college, having seen and done so much, and yet having nothing to show for it. You might think that in the course of all these adventures, all this art and collected writing, and all this schooling, probability would suggest that I’ve received at least one scrap of paper, one surviving artifact, one letter, or a little bit of money to show for my achievements as they stand so far in this life. I’m still trying for that one big payday, correction, I view it as an inevitability, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t done anything. A lot of what I have done can’t be explained by an official price of paper or trinket, and remembering those stories do just as well as the official stuff.

The thing had haunted my dreams for a long time. A nine foot tall man, very old, sitting on a wooden throne. He had horns of iron and a very long beard. It would be years before I would know him as Belfagor. I hated him before I knew what an arch demon was. Somehow even then I knew he was an intruder, and his eyes reflected my hatred as he reveled in the majesty of my youthful imagination. I feel cheated when I look back on my childhood dreaming, knowing that all the while he was there, feeding on the innovation of my mind, still blissfully ignorant of the laws of physics that plague the inventions of even brilliant adults. Laws that adults believe they can’t escape. Laws that, even now it is strange to me, children somehow know can be ignored and/or only vaguely taken into account. For this is the inspiration that Belfagor takes from it’s rightful owners to disperse among his pets and pawns, fools all, willing to make a deal with him, rewarding them for their service to him whilst simultaneously tightening his grip on them. Compared to the arch demons I had exchanged sneers and blows with so far In my young adult life, Belfagor was comparatively a little fish, but if he dared to get near me in the skin of a human, I would go out of my way to hunt him down and fry him myself. Extra well done. My outburst at Belial would be nothing compared to what would come to Belfagor for tainting my innocence, and in a fragile body even Belial had a hard time holding his own when I started to lose my temper, a demon considerably stronger. This was going to get interesting.

A piece of fiction I’m currently working on. If this is interesting, that’s good.

These are the times when I realize that you were dead. It felt like a funeral, except the feeling was even worse than the feelings I’ve felt in burying all those I’ve outlived so far. Your shell was there, but you were gone. We were optimistic at the time, but no one was sure that you would come back, or that they could help bring you back. And yet here you stand today, against all odds, and I still never take that for granted, because I know we were lucky. I know now that what I’m a part of truly is remarkable. Something we will never be able to find again, no matter how many lives we live.