People like me

I made a new friend today. Yet it feels as if I have known him for ages. There was just something about him that made me look at him as an inspiration. He was everything I liked about myself but was too scared to bring out. He was almost just like me but without all of the fears and disappointments that bound me from being my true self. He was everything that I wanted to be, a dream I had every night as I went to sleep was to eventually turn into him. More than his strength, more than his intelligence, more than his confidence I liked the fact that he didn’t have any fears. He was not scared of anything at all, especially the opinions and lives of people that were not him. Yet for some reason he always cared about me, what I thought, and how I felt. He was able to understand parts of me that I could not explain to anyone. It was like finding a friend in myself.

This was not just any normal guy though. I could only see him when I was tired. I don’t mean just out of breath or regularly tired. I mean that every single drop of effort inside has been used up now tired. When I was just so completely spent that nothing around me made sense, he would appear. Not like a ghost that appeared out of thin air, but like a pat on the back as I sat down after giving it everything I had. At that moment when I thought I was worth nothing more and had given my best, he whispered in my ear how I had about two hours of work left in me. That I was not done yet. He was what gave me my second gear, he was that last magazine when I was completely out of ammunition. He had a solution for every single excuse I gave him.

Slowly, even in times when I was not with him. I saw glimpses of his words in myself. As if he was out there controlling everything I did. The problem was, I did not realise exactly when he took control and when he gave it back to my hands. There did not seem to be too much of a noticeable shift in my own observable self. Those around me could see it. I could see it on their face, how they would be so surprised and caught off guard when I did something his way. It bothered me that they looked like that. I did not want to displease them or make them uncomfortable with what I was doing. I never would. On the other hand, he did not care, if it was not giving me benefit, if he felt it was something without value, he would call it out straight in the face. Openly, without a filter. On some level, it was what I respected him for. Yet not everyone saw it in that way. Some people took it as an offence.

He found that quite humorous, and slowly I began to feel like that as well. As I realised that the reason he was the brilliant way he was, was because he did not look too much into these reactions when I did. How did he do it? how did he manage to not care at all? It was bizarre to me. So I asked him one night, at a point where I knew I could not garner even another gram of effort out of myself. I asked him “How did you become like this? How can you live and separate yourself from the world so easily?” at that point his smile faded away. He leaned in, looked me dead in the eye and said “I did not do anything, the world automatically separates people like me.”