Alex's Story

Alex was 16 the first time he touched hard liquor. He had spent 16 years in pain, torment and agony, and on that fateful day, when he was offered a way to escape, even for just a short while, he took it. Growing up in a podunk town in Maine, the misconception that depression and hardship can’t find you is one that Alex found far to  cmany people make. For the rich vacationers and tourists who frequent his town in the summer, Maine seems like heaven. But once the summer heat has lifted and leaves have all dropped from the trees, a loneliness settles in that not even a familiar face can lift. For Alex, this was his reality. 

In a town where everyone knows each other, secrets are impossible to keep. Reputations, once created, were never forgotten. No matter how hard he tried, Alex could never escape the stigma that followed him and his family all over the god damned town. At school he was an outcast, immediately labeled as something to be avoided. There was some bulling in his school, the periodic jock who used a freshman nerd as a punching bag to try and impress whatever blond cheerleader he was fond of at the moment, but in Alex’s case, he was left alone. He figured that was the one good thing about his situation, fear was a powerful motive, and he was never bothered in school. People would move out of his way in the halls, and leave empty desks all around the ones that he sat at. That suited him, he would rather be left alone than tormented. He often watched the popular kids at lunch from his solitary table in the corner, wondering if they were as full on the inside as they seemed on the outside. Or if by some chance, like him, they were filled with the loneliness and pain that felt like it would rip him apart at the seems. High school has a way of haunting people for the rest of their lives, but for Alex, this was nothing new, he had been haunted his entire life.

People looked down on Alex in his town, some felt sorry for him, but all avoided him. It didn’t matter how long ago the incident had happen, the brand that had been bestowed on his family lived on in stories and in myth. In small New England towns superstitions were held on to like possessions, those Puritans never let go of a damn thing. 

  As if they had the power to make him feel this way, treating him as if the devil himself lived inside him. He hated that it worked. He despised himself, feeling that there had to be something wrong with him, to people treat him so. As a child, growing up with these feelings had installed them deep within him, and he was worried he would never be able to escape. Alex learned to look at the world through condescending eyes, noting how self important and pathetic people truly are. Cutting people down made Alex feel better, triumphant even, he was an intelligent human being surrounded by lower life forms roaming around in what they thought were there all important lives.

However, it never did for him what it was meant too, it never changed anything. He was still waiting for the day he would feel good, the day that he would no longer feel alone, unwanted, and loathed. He was waiting for that day when he took his first drink, multiple court summons and years later, he is still waiting for that day.