prologue: How To Stay Alive (With A Broken Heart)
chapter 1: Young Orchid

Chapter 2
Milky Way

 

the next few years were horrible.

I came into an age which i usually refer to as ‘age of awareness’. It’s the age a kid starts to build the personality which he will carry on for most of his life later on. This usually happens somewhere between the age of 10 and 15 and comes along with a realization of how the world works. Before that we human beings are merely more than an empty shell and everything can happen, but after we found ourself in life, realize that we are going to die, decide abut our religion and what we want to achieve, we are pretty much fixed to a somewhat constant blueprint of a self that barely changes afterward. So this period is pretty much the most important in life.

And my introduction into this phase was pretty harsh. I was in a lot of fights, and usually lost, because i was always outnumbered. I got to get an idea abut why people suck and my hatred for reality itself started to manifest. I started to see flaws everywhere, imperfection and nonsense, violence and suffering with no purpose to be, and i blamed everything on everyone else. I felt very alone, and wished things to change. My mother told me that i suppressed a lot of things that happened to me back then, so there should have been far worse things than i can actually remember. It did not came to my mind that i kinda forced this way of view onto myself, because i wanted to see the world as a bad place to make me feel superior. My self esteem back then was practically none existent, so it made sense to compensate this by focusing on the bad things in life and blaming everything on stupidity and hatred. But looking back i now know that i simply overlooked the good things.

Anyways, why is this important? Well, the sole reason for why i overlooked the good things was that the best thing in my life was suddenly missing, Young Orchid. And i was so busy hating people that i started to forget about her. she was the archetype for what i was looking for, even at that early point, but i just didn’t know it. My low self esteem was bad for me in many ways: my grades got worse, i couldn’t talk to girls and my circle of friends got manageable small. At least i could befriend with some other outcasts, like me. But with love there was about to be a long period of nothingness. Beside from usual pre-mature crushes on one or the other female schoolmate, i got really detached from everything romantic. Sure, some girls talked to me, but rarely on a level of friendship, if even that. I don’t remember at which point in my life this was, but i think i was about 15 or 16 when a girl got interested in me, somehow. Milky Way was the friend of a female friend (this suddenly sounds way more positive that it actually was) and she suddenly hang around with me sometimes, to the confusion of my real friends. She kinda liked me, but i was too diverted to even recognize it! Yes, i did not notice her attraction to me, this is how much of a misfit i was at the time. I was already dependable of being loved and cried a lot about why nobody liked me, but i was stupid enough to not see love when it hit me in the face with a bat. Well, of course i noticed some sort of interest, but at least my low self esteem kept me from doing any step at all.

I remember a day in summer when we went to the beach – of course it was her idea, i would not have had the guts to even ask her out to something like that. We had fun in the water, and at some point she said something about her ex-boyfriend walking by on the beach and she wanted to look us like a couple and started to get really touchy. There was no one i saw walking by. And yes, i did not know what this was all about, stupid me.

I never did anything that could have given her the impression that i was interested in her, too. She was this kind of playful, funny and positive girl that i found to be really cute. But from her perspective i sure was not interested, and i guess after that day in summer she just gave up on me. What a waste of time i must have been for her. I feel sorry, because my stupidity chased her away. And made my misery even worse. My first real big depression caught me, with death wishes and all the shit i regret. I dealt with it by changing…

 

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