Kid Against The World: One

Chapter One

There is something wrong inside me that makes me want to kill, kill myself perhaps, kill somebody, just kill something, to feel life fading away through my fingertips and cordially invite it to the abysmal darkness that is death, and all its uncertainty. Maybe it’s because how I can’t turn off the loneliness inside of me, and I want so much to fill it in. I yearn to close the hole and make myself full. Because I feel hollow, I feel transparent and incomplete. I feel like a negative person and that I do not have gist.

The credits are rolling on the cinema screen signaling me to get my butt off from this seat, and all I could feel is the dimness of the cinema hall’s ambiance and how it is swallowing me, the way we all feel about how life is fleeting and an unknown sensation. Going to the cinemas on a swell Saturday alone, every weekend has been a routine; comedy, action, romance, fantasy, animation, sport, documentary, sci-fi, horror, mystery, and now and then history, I’ve watched all of them.

I love watching movies, because it makes me feel that I am not living a real life. Because why would I want to live in a place that has no appeal. In the movies, if a bad thing happens, it’s okay, because it’s not real. And that is okay. But in real life, bad things are real and they always happen, and all we have to do is just take it in. That is not very appealing.

And then the credits ends and the cinema lights slightly lit up, not too bright, just bright enough to see the mess people have made when they were watching the movie. Savages.

The light hurts my eyes as I stare right at it, I lift my hand in front of my eyes to block the ray and then a cinema staff with red shirt comes in with his flashlight and looks at me, he says timidly to me, “You have to go.”

I put my hand down, totally ignoring the worker and stare at the big black empty cinema screen and I feel hot even in this highly pumped air-conditioned box. It’s hot as hell in this body of mine, like the wars in the Middle East. I feel hungry, but at the same if I eat something at the moment I know I’m going to puke the filth out. My knees to the tip of my hair, it is like a stone. I can’t move from this seat, I mean I want to. I want to get out of here, but I can’t. And even though, I feel as hot as I am, I am not sweating, not one bit.

“Kid, you have to get out of here right now,” the worker continues to pest me. “Manager, it is this kid again, that doesn’t want to go away,” he talks to his walkie-talkie, not even trying to cover how he is referring to me rudely.

As I said, I have been coming here every weekend for quite some time now, and every time I come here, I seem to have trouble getting up from the seat after a movie. Maybe because I am afraid of going out and face real life. I don’t know, or maybe I just don’t want to admit to myself. In a sense, I am weak, I am fragile, I am nothing but something left rotten.

The manager comes in, this man with skinny legs, chubby belly, but a rather normal face. “Kid,” he says to me gently, he knows that I’m a regular and tries to be polite but deep down he hates me. He has better things to do than trying to make a teenager leave the damn seat. “You need to go, I’m sorry,” he says this like he knows I am lost.

I close my eyes for about four seconds, let the movie sink in me, and then I turn to the manager. This is when I leave, but not before giving a force smile to the man as I get up from my seat and leave the cinema hall.

The manager was really nice to me. Not a lot of people are nice to each other, that’s a problem.

I think the problem with a lot of people is that they have no idea how cruel they are to each other. They are so alluded by their own pain, they think they have the right to crush other people, thinking it will make the pain lessen or something. It doesn’t work like that.

I’m not different. I’m like the rest of them. I’m so self-pitied, the only butt I see is my own.

Maybe I feel the way I feel at the moment is because I am starting to realize that I will never amount to anything, and that my life would be no different than anybody else’s, no, my life would be a degradation of the average person. No, that’s no right either, my life would be much worse than a homeless person. I don’t know, maybe I am overthinking about this, and everything will be fine.

It got easier to get up from the chair because somebody was nice to me, I needed that. It is easier to go on when somebody, anybody acts all nice to you, even though how fake it is. After a long time of living on this earth, we tend to be harsh to ourselves and others. It seemed nice to receive a kindness I know I don’t deserve.

The manager probably thinks I’m this lonely kid who doesn’t have friends, and he is a hundred percent right.

Of all the sixteen staffs in the cinema, this manager with his goatee and bald head is by far the nicest one to me, I know he is pretending. Nobody is actually nice to each other. But it’s good, it’s all good, it doesn’t have to be real to be good. Good can be pretend, good can be fake, and good can’t be good and still be good.

I go outside, and find myself a sit on a bench and then I light a cigarette.

Ah, the warm sensation coursing through my lungs and veins as I flirt with death and dance on the devil’s playground is a sweet release. I feel golden. I feel like dirt. I feel like trash. I feel like I am not worthy of anything but torment and pain and suffering and bad grammar. I am the worst grammar. In my mind I think of life and death, and what a blessing it is.

Saturday afternoon and I’m feeling poetically sentimental. Kill me now for I have sin. For I have become a pretentious spas.

I turn to catch a couple making their way into the mall, she was wearing clothes that make her look stunning and indeed she is as I study her tight bum. And the guy, he is wearing flip flops. How class is that. I just stare them as they were half way in, not much of a ‘them’ but just her. She knew I was looking and she loves it, she loves the attention, girls like her with their two hour hairdo, thick expensive makeup, and tight revealing dresses, just love it when people stare. That’s what they live for. That’s what makes them strong like how Goku from DragonBall gets stronger the more he screams, girls like this get stronger the more eyes train at them.

The girl’s man turned to me, he was a class guy, wearing a stupid typical snapback cap on backwards, cheap sunglasses, baggy cargo shorts, and yellow flip flops. Yellow. I laugh by the sight of it. That is the ugliest thing ever. “What are you looking?” he says to me with this annoying cockiness in his voice.

I count eighty three heartbeats per minute as I look at the man. I don’t actually quite know why I was nervous. He was short, small, and timid.  “Nothing,” I reply, not wanting a fight. “I wasn’t looking at anything,” I say this with a smirk on my face and my cigarette still between my lips.

“Right, nothing, just what I thought,” he says as he pulls away his girl away from me and then enters the mall.

He wasn’t really going to fight me because the truth is people are too afraid to be in a real fight. Too afraid to actually get hurt, and I wouldn’t hold judgment to that. As humans, we have only successfully evolved up to this point because we are afraid of everything, because we will do everything in our power to avoid or kill the things we are afraid. As time proceed, we tend to be more evading rather than executing, because we have turn to soft little timid creatures. But coming back to the topic, the reason why I know the man wouldn’t lay a finger on me is because I know people. As much as contradictory that may be, given to the situation that I rarely engage conversing with other people, I am actually quite astute when it comes to human nature.

People might laugh when I say this is my greatest quality, only because they are too stupid to understand and I am too mess up to care.

I continue smoking my cigarette, flick the ashes away, smoke it again, flick it again, and smoke it again till the butt is all that is left. “Goodbye,” I ide my cigarette as I stomp it on the cemented ground with my black boots.

I started smoking when I was eleven or twelve perhaps, after I found a pack of Marlboro in the middle of the street. It was unopened, and I was curious.

A week after that, I can’t stop. And because of my age then, finding cigarettes to smoke was hard. I can’t remember it, but I can recall how not having something to smoke after just being addicted to it was like being impaled by a rotten steel from my mouth down to butthole.

And because of that I stole cigarettes when I was younger than I am now, all I wanted was to feel something. I am seventeen now, and now and then I steal, but I buy my smokes most of the time.

Don’t smoke just because your friends pressure you to, the school told me along with the rest of the ignorant student body. Your friends aren’t your real friends if they ask you to do the things you don’t want to, the school advised, thinking these words would help kids not smoke. But nobody placed the cigarette between my lips when I first light it, nobody told me that in order to be friends with them I have to smoke, nobody talked to me at all. Smoking to me isn’t a pastime I do with other people, it’s what I do with myself so I can feel something. So I don’t feel all lost, even temporary as it may be.

I close my eyes as I sit here.

I remember this dream I had yesterday night when I woke up in the middle of the night around four in the morning. Funny how a time can be morning and it is night. In the dream I am this furry bear working in a Burger King restaurant, and I worked one of the cash registers. It was a busy day, a lot of customers were lining up, requesting their orders. The customers comprised of cats, dogs, wolves, foxes, all sorts of animals, except for giraffes, because giraffes are just damn ugly. And then one customer came to me, he wasn’t no animal but a walking skeletal human wearing those business suits. He had no eyes, no tongue, no nose, no skin, no organs, no nothing, but he was there and he could omit a voice. “I would like a fat burger, and your liver,” he says to me. And I gave the skeletal man his big fat burger, but he urged, “And your liver, please, I ordered your liver. I would like to have your liver along with this fat burger.

I went to the back of the restaurant, took a knife, and cut out my liver. I was a bear working in a chain of hamburger fast food restaurant, who cut his own liver out to oblige this man. When I got back with my liver served on a plate, the skeletal man was no more and that was when I woke up.

Am I alright? Am I mental?

I feel like this dream is my real life.

But then I’m no bear and I have never met a skeleton man. This kind of dream makes me want to kill myself and live in it instead, I don’t think people can understand that. People can’t know that.

I open my eyes as I am getting up. And then I make my way back home, quiet and alone. As much as a film viewing goes, there are worse days, and then there are just normal days, this was an ‘okay’ day.

Walking home after watching a movie and a good cigarette, I felt a little better than usual. I am not suicidal or homicidal, I am just young, pathetic and lonely.

After the movies, I am still but slightly young, pathetic and lonely. And that’s more than what I asked for.