Member-only story
the man who wasn’t one
He walked to the mirror. He looked into his own eyes and hated what he saw there.
He’d been a man once. He’d fought in wars, hard as that may be to believe today, looking into that fat, weak face. A fat, weak man in a fat, weak world.
He looked at himself and wondered what had become of him. He’d been something once. At least, he imagined he had been. Maybe that too was an illusion.
Regardless…now, he was nothing.
A man can’t speak about such things clearly and openly. To do so only compounds the pain and humiliation. A man is meant to suffer in silence, or else to disappear.
And he wanted to disappear. He wanted to fade into the fold. He couldn’t, though. People were counting on him.
For the people counting on him he would go on. There are only two choices, really, and he’d not be one of those to take the other, though he never blamed those who did.
For him, though, there was but one choice, from the day he was born: Onward.
For that one choice, he’d have to rebuild himself. He’d have to find the man he’d once been, if such a man had ever existed.
And if that man had never existed? Well, then he’d have to create him brand new.
