Another time, another place.

I’m staring around my blue painted room in panicked desperation.  The computer, tabs flicking between Word and AltaVista’s ‘asian blowjob’ search results.  A gothic poster that I hoped would look cool if a girl ever came here.  Books from my recent childhood.  My family unheard, in bed, perhaps asleep.  It’s late.  I’ve been drinking coffee.  My heart races unevenly.

Do they know?

I can’t focus because of the gloomy pit of despair that twists like a cruel, bloated worm from my throat to my bowels.  It’s there most of the time.  Been there for years, growing and squirming inside me.  I wake up to it and fall asleep with it.  I’m sometimes amazed that I’m still alive.  How can I feel like this, for so long, and yet move and breathe like a normal person?  The feeling is so physically and emotionally painful that I’m sure it must eventually give me cancer or a heart attack.  Sometimes I hope that it does.  I am twenty but I feel like an old man looking back at my insubstantial life with regret.

I have few friends.  The ones I have are getting sick of me and are trying to fade away but I persist, turning up at parties to which I have not been invited, ignoring their embarrassed confusion, talking hopelessly to girls even I find unattractive.  I have no girlfriend.  I have no achievements to my name.  I stare at the ceiling, thinking again of my parents who have their own problems.

Do they know?

I roll over, flick again to the back pages of the local paper.  Advertisements for brothels.  There’s one not so far away, in an industrial area.  But, do I dare? Read More