Less than a Minute

I’m technically considered an adult among my kind.

Technically.

But it’s a lot like being a human. Technically, one is a legal adult at the tender age of 18 in this country. And it takes many more years until the human brain is fully developed, and many more years after that till a majority of the population learns that maturity isn’t just a number that’s annually celebrated, or buying their very own milk to place on the second shelf of their very own refrigerator.

So, technically speaking, I am considered an adult. It took me seven years living with a human to realize that I am a complete fuckwit.

I got the notion in my head that I could save her. My love and affection would sustain her through out all the shit life dumped on her. For those seven years I thought I was making a real difference to her. And from what she tells me, I was. It never occurred to me that she was doing her best to make me feel better about my own actions and self-perception. She was kind in those little ways that will one day come back to bite you in the ass.

It takes less than a minute to come to terms with reality. I changed her, in many and various ways, to be sure. But if I lay out the moments we shared, lay them all on the floor like snap shots of our time together, and take a step back, I see the big picture. While I schemed and dreamed and pushed her to chase her desires, she did the same to me. And she was the true champion in this game. For every smile I pulled out of her, she pulled two out of me. That was the nature of our interactions.

It takes less than a minute. Maybe about thirty-four seconds to understand that all along, it wasn’t about saving her. It was about saving myself. Improving my own self worth.

Thirty-four seconds to wish I had thanked her for all the good she has done for me.

Allow me to Introduce Anna

Every good love story begins with an introduction.

Anna Thema is a woman hated by many. She is cruel--her ruminations often focus on her hate for retards. She is kind--the company she keeps on many holidays is that of retards. She spent much of her life being put down by her classmates, and herself, and sometimes, very occasionally, her family. Though those are the rejections that hurt the most.

Anna herself cannot often see the good she has to offer the world, only the bad. She is self-centered, ignorant, lazy, and uninspired for the last six years. What little of her life she once enjoyed is now gone, replaced by materialistic desires. Her deities silent, backs turned as she assumes, when it is in fact she who has turned her back on them.

The problem Anna faces is this: she has entered the world of adulthood. And was woefully unprepared for the onslaught life threw at her. Now, I know the thoughts you have are this: that each and every one of us has to grow up sooner rather than later, and this mope Anna needs to “get over herself” and if she is unhappy in her situation, then to get up off her lazy ass and do something about it. Which is well and good of you to say so.

Allow me this, however. As you sit here and read this, are you yourself happy with your position in life? Your current standings in the leader boards of love, income, career? What you’ve managed to do with yourself since high school or college? How many people you have saved, starving children you fed, trees spared from being the next hit teen series?

Are you yourself happy with how things stand?

I doubt many of you are. And neither is she. But there is a difference between Anna and many of the people she encounters every day, or dreams of meeting, or hasn’t met up with in years.

The difference, my melancholy audience, is that Anna isn’t afraid to admit she is unhappy.

She isn’t afraid to admit that yes, retarded people can be annoying as fuck, as can babies and boyfriends and moms and dads. And friends and phones and other people driving and when she just knows others are staring at her with their judging eyes, but she’s being “paranoid.” Anna isn’t afraid to tell you just how she feels about her job, will agree she probably shouldn’t be there. She would like to say she is too proud to beg, though knows she has never been in a position where she had to.

The years have crawled by, and Anna realizes this: she never has enough money to be happy. Her shitty job does not pay her enough to put the troubles of work behind her when she leaves for the night, for she knows that the very next day she will be back, taking the weight of that small world on her shoulders for the next eight hours, trying to make it right by everyone when she needs to be making it right by herself. She relies on this hellhole to provide her with a means to provide for herself. Bills need paid, medicine bought, and woe, the holidays are right around the corner. There is never enough money to dig her out of this hole, and she wonders why she even attempts to better her situation.

Anna knows there is something wondrous to look forward to. The world has more to offer, if only she can go and explore.

Anna has much to learn. About all the usual, life, love, sex. When she should and shouldn’t put herself out there to help her fellow man. That as cliché as this sounds, money isn’t the answer to everything. And actually isn’t the answer to most things.

Anna has much to learn. And I’ll be the one to teach her. Because, to me she isn’t just Anna Thema. She’s the most beautiful soul in the world.