I Am Not Here

This article started in my head as a consideration. Born out of a potential nice gesture.

I wanted, and still want to, buy a gift for my fiernd's one year old daughter. And while pondering what to buy, i considered how potentially creepy my long bearded face could look to the eyes of a toy seller. I dont think i have the looks of a potential child harasser. But no one ever knows.

And that brought me to think of how much i like, when i'm in a store or a public place, to say "hi" and smile to little kids. How i like to help them reach something from a shelf too high for them. Or help them to recover missing toys. How i adore their faces when they are of a certain age. And how, as a lonely, scruffy, thirty-something man, i kinda cannot do this anymore, since automatically most mothers react protectively towards their kids. And at first my mental reaction is "do i look like a potential threat", and i know i really dont. So it made me indignant.

Then i realized, at the peak of my poisonous self aware that, at the eyes of someone who doesnt know me, i might as well be. Actually, i am a threat at the eyes of people who DO know me.

And in the end, threat or no threat, this is what i am: i'm an adult man that has no family, no kids of his own, is mostly a loner and dresses and looks like someone who isnt completely sure of his future. Right now, i dont werar ties or suits. Once, that was for me, a sign of something. SOme sort of statement, for others it still is. But if youre honest, you have to realize the truth: not wearing a suit, in today's world just means you either have a job that allows you that, or that youre so completely detached from the real world that you dont have any interest anymore in how people see you.

And i realize that i have no kids. My father and my mother are depressed and love to repeat to me at any chance how they feel suicidal. My father told me that today.

I do not love him or like him. And yet, this broken man, with whom i have an estranged relationship at best, sends me into pain and melancholy evrytime he says that. I know i'll suffer when he dies. Because in the end, he is my father.

And that reminds me this: i have no kids. No spouse. I have no one, my absence would really change things for. I have people who love me, which will suffer and cry, eventually. But those things will pass. I have no one that will have part of me in their blood. I will have no one that i have to really think of when the dark thoughts come.

I do fight those thoughts daily but when i do, and i end up thinking of the ones who love me., the last voice i hear says: "their tear will dry, but then theyll find consolation in their own families and loved ones. your memory will disappear"

Ive been facing that feeling lately. And wanting to have family of my own. And yet i feel i cannot. Cause i am broken. Cause i am almost on the edge of unemplyment. Cause of million of reasons.

So maybe thats my destiny. I dont really know.