My truth

   The moment I came out from the interview, I took out one my cigarettes and lit it up right there, in front of the office building. There was no one there doing the same thing, so of course people looked at me as if I was the strangest thing they had ever done, almost as if they had never even seen a human smoking in their lives. Maybe it was my clothes or the way I was standing up or maybe the fact that it was obvious I didn’t belong there. Maybe they were very good at looking through people and knowing their truth.

 I didn’t stay long to figure it out. With my cig on my mouth, I walked towards the bus stop. I didn’t really want to go back home so soon, so I wasn’t precisely running to grab the bus. I stood a bit far from the bus stop in order to finish the cigarette, as I thought of the questions they had asked me and the answers I had given. My truth right then and there was that I wanted to scream, to run away and just put my head inside a hole in the ground. I was frustrated and tired and just fed up with everything around me.

 My bus came in too fast, so I had to put off my cigarette. Luckily, the bus was not as filled up as it could have been. I was a bit pissed off that I had to pay for it, only because I knew going to that stupid interview had been a waste of time. The same thing had happened that year, once and again and again and again. Sometimes it was in places close to my home but I mostly had to travel by bus in order to just feel like an imbecile once I got to the actual interview. I had to sit there and pretend I knew shit about shit.

 Somehow, I had learned to pretend and lie in many parts of my life, but never in situations like interviews. Actually, more than not knowing how to do it, I think it was something related to not having the same mindset than the people doing the interview. I knew I wasn’t one of them. And I don’t mean it like saying I’m better or something like that. I’m certainly not better. But the point is we weren’t understanding each other because we were two very different types of people who could never connect at any level.

 That happened to me in every interview, from the moment I came out of college until today, six years later. Six years and I have never had a steady job because people won’t hire me. Maybe it’s lack of enthusiasm or maybe it’s just that I don’t have any skills or knowledge that can be applied in a “useful” job. And I live in a country were jobs are a precious thing, not really offered in every corner. And yet, some people get them and stay in them for several years or maybe all of their lives. And here I am, over thirty now, jobless and still wondering if I will ever be able to live by myself.

 As I step down the bus, a couple of blocks away from my house, I decide to take my ass to the nearest park. I have no need to hear my mother’s questions about the interview or feel how my dad looks at me knowing that I’m a complete and utter failure. No, I need to mix it up a little bit and maybe the park has exactly what I need. If I was a pothead, I would consider smoking there for a while but I cannot even have an interesting hobby like that one. I’m very boring and just sit there by myself.

 There are many guys walking dogs and old ladies also doing the same thing. I get obsessed for a while with people picking up their dogs businesses. Then, I remember why I’m there and my world just crumbles again. I feel the need to cry but I really don’t want to. I’m tired of having done that so many times in the past. It’s like I’m dried up, just too damn tired to shed one more tear into this ungrateful fucking world. I’d rather just stay put and think about something else, escape from everything once again.

 Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Why doesn’t that faggot just commit to something and start changing his ways? Why doesn’t he just become whatever it is that people are looking for in a worker? I mean, that’s what people do: they pretend to be this superhuman in order to be considered for anything from a job to a damn relationship. Fuck, even people that want to fuck each other lie about many things in order to get laid. So what’s up with this guy? Why doesn’t he just do what everybody else does and shut up?

 Well, I can’t. I physically can’t. I cannot pretend forever, I cannot work in something I despise or don’t even have an interest in. Of course I don’t have that luxury, to like what I work in. I don’t and I know that. But even in that case I just feel like I have no other option but being this sack of gas and shit that biology turned me into. I cannot just acquire all of those things that people have because it’s a case of you have it or you don’t. At least it is for me, from my point of view.

 Of course, you people are just thinking: “Who the fuck does this guy think he is? Why doesn’t he just do something, like all the rest of us do?” And the real answer to that is that I don’t have a fucking clue why I don’t do that, why I don’t just turn into someone else and become this being that everyone wants to be connected with. But I can’t. I have failed as a human male, I know that. And I’m trying to reconcile with that in a world that doesn’t give a fuck about individuals, where the group is always much more important than anything you might be feeling in your little weak head.

 When I realize it, it’s almost completely dark. The lamps on the park illuminate everything in the creepiest way and it does remind me that this city is filled with rapists, murderers, robbers and, the worst part, stupid fuckers. So I stand up and walk a few blocks towards home. I prepare in my mind phrases to tell my mother and my father. As I enter the building and press the elevator button, the sense of dread enters my soul once again. I feel awful, like crying once again, but I just don’t do it. What good will that make?

 I enter home and, as predicted, she asks me about how it went and my father looks at me over his glasses. I just say whatever thing it was that I prepared and then excuse myself because I really want to pee. And it’s true, but I also want to run away from there because I have no need to watch them look at me. I feel parents can really see through their children, even if they decide to buy the lies you tell them as their sons and daughters. Parents always know, in one way or the other, and that has always scared me.

 I enter the bathroom, close the door and pull out my penis. As I pee, I look myself at the mirror and see someone I don’t completely like. It’s not only his looks that I have always hated, but also the fact that he cannot be the person that everyone wants him to me, that he needs to be in order to survive this motherfucking world. Look at him, staring back at me with those depressing little eyes and that fucking brain that’s only filled with garbage. I can say I sometimes despise him to death.

 And his looks. He cannot even get anyone to fuck him and there is no doubt why. Never mind the tiny dick, just look at his face. He looks sick and oily, just disgusting. He finishes peeing, washes his hands in seconds and leaves. I enter my room and just fall on my bed. Again, I want to cry and scream and yell and hit and kick. But I can’t. I know nothing of the sorts will help me be whoever it is I’m supposed to be. It just won’t and I don’t know what to do next, when to just quit for good. It seems like the obvious choice.

 How many times can I stand being rejected for a job interview? For how long can I wait until I understand that no one will ever hire me to do anything? Am I resistant enough to last like this forever? Should I even keep doing that now, that I know the reality of who I am and my possibilities?

 I fall asleep and wake up in the middle of night. My mother apparently understood it all, because she didn’t wake me up or nothing. It’s four in the morning and my thoughts race through my head. I’m trying to stay in control, but sometimes it is taken from you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Facts of war

   The bombs had suddenly stopped dropping from the sky. There was an awful, eerie silence that occupied everywhere that still stood, which wasn’t much. Most of the city was now ruins, a bunch of unrecognizable rubble where people had lived and tried to have good lives and happy days. But that had ended some time ago, when the war started and things went rapidly downhill for everyone in every corner of the globe. It had happened so fast that no one really knew how to explain it or understand it. It was just chaos in it’s simplest form.

 Before bombs started dropping, people thought it would never come to that. They innocently thought that the war would be fought in empty, far away spaces, where no one would ever get hurt and where countries could argue for long periods of time without really affecting the civilian population. Those who thought that had visibly no idea of what war was really like and how it had destroyed and devastated the world once and again in the past. How cities had been leveled down by fire and force and how the strong ones didn’t really care who they hit and how.

 The morning before the bombs dropped on the city, people were already getting a bit nervous but not nearly as nervous as they should’ve been. They had all heard about the rumors that new airplanes that could fly without being detected could be sent in any moment to attack. But the frontline of the war was so far way that people simply didn’t buy that theory. They claimed that some people were being alarmists in order to get some sort of advantage in the war. They decided to deny any possibility of war coming to them. It was their undoing.

 Most of the people in the city died right then, that morning when the sun was just coming up and then, out of nowhere, the first bomb was dropped in the city. It is strange to say it, but the enemy had the so-called kindness to drop a single bomb on an industrial part of the city first in order for people to be able to run to the nearest shelters or to get safe in any way possible. It was a kind of warning shot. Most people ignored it and that’s why the amount of survivors, on the days following the decimation of the city, was so low.

 The few people that survived did recognize the signs of what had happened and ran to the underground parking lots and places similar to those. There were no shelters because they had chosen not to get ready for a war that was real, even if it was far from their homes. Most survivors had to be dug out from under the rubble because they had been underground by chance. Almost no one had actually run down from their home to protect themselves. They really didn’t believe anything could happen to them, as if they were special in some way.

 But they were not. The city was not treated any differently than any other city before or after that. The enemy had a clear objective and new exactly how to hit a target in order to have maximal damage and be able to withdraw fast if the attacked nation reacted efficiently. This was almost never the case as they always destroyed military bases and other potential points of defense in order to be able to do whatever they wanted. The rules of war were clear to them.

 Exactly two day after the bombing started, the bombers retired and went back home. They had done their job and the ground army was already advancing fast, taking advantage of the new position they had taken. It was a very dared strategy but it had worked perfectly for them. When the army arrived, they helped the survivors out of the rubble and they put them in special camps to be held as prisoners of war. No one was mistreated in any way and that made the whole experience a little bit worse. People couldn’t properly hate them if they were suddenly kind to them.

 Of course, they had been the ones that destroyed their city and probably killed many members of their families and friends. But the treatment in the detention center was not the one of a concentration camp or anything like it. It was exactly as if the hundreds of survivors had been taken to a five-star hotel to be locked down as prisoners. It was a very odd thing to experience and most people had no idea what to feel, what to say to the guards and how to react to anything. However, it was clear who had won and who had lost that battle.

 Many other camps like that one appeared in the region, as the enemy’s army advances through the continent. They had a pretty successful year but then, at the end of it, the expansion stopped. The invaded nations were responding but only with skirmishes and guerrilla warfare. The fact that winter had come was an important factor in them being successful and the enemy deciding that the advance of their troops could hold for a while as they decided a new course of action that would end the war in the favor, once and for all.

 The winter was unusually long and harsh. Snow covered the ruins of many cities and prisoners in camps realized that their situation was harder than they realized. Even though they had a goo reason to feel good about being in a warm place during the violent snowstorms, they realized that they were prisoners because of they weren’t they would be out there, standing in the storm with a weapon, defending their countries and their right to exist. Not all of them thought the same but a general feeling of sadness and confusion could be felt among the prisoners.

 When the winter ended, people assumed the enemy would resume expansion and the war would be over in months. But that didn’t happen. Pockets of resistance had appeared during the summer and they turned stronger once the weather got better. No matter their big guns and strategies, the enemy’s army couldn’t taken them all down as they wanted to. They had to be smart about it and realized that their plan for expansion had problems from the beginning, as they had never thought people could resist them.

 That entire year, the Resistance movement, which spanned several countries with different languages and cultures, was able to have some small victories over the enemy. They robbed some weapons or transports; they temporally blocked their advance or just annoyed them when trying to do anything. It was a very tense year and it was the turning point for everything or at least for most things. Prisoners were still in the camps and the destroyed cities remained on the ground. That hadn’t and wouldn’t change in a long while.

 The following winter, the enemy decided the offensive was taking too long so they did something that no one expected them to do: they reached out to the Resistance and proposed they negotiate a deal to end the war. Of course, the people that had been massacred and persecuted were not very keen on accepting anything that came from the invader. Most people called the move a trap and felt that it was a new strategy by their enemy to exterminate any opposition to their plans for the whole world. They didn’t trust them at all, they couldn’t.

 However, they finally sent a group to discuss what the ideas were for the ending of the conflict. The war had lasted for too long and it was worth the shot to at least know what they could potentially do to end the fighting. The group that met with the enemy was very nervous about everything but the others tended to tend as if they were allies. They gave them a great dinner and told them that they wouldn’t return any of the occupied lands but tht they could liberate some territory for people to leave in what could be called the Free Cities.

Those cities would have access to sea and rivers, would controlled by Resistance but an Occupation Board would oversee anything to do with the cities and their development. They would basically be free but with a few limitations. The group went back to the rest of the rebels with the proposal and, it had to be said, they discussed thoroughly for many days. It was very hard to discuss what was right or what was wrong because any measure is good to end death. But at what cost should that be done? The decision didn’t make everyone happy, that’s for sure.