Chapter 1 Part 1: Why me?

It's been two years since I have seen him and he's late. I keep looking to my watch. Five past the hour...ten past, no sign. I'm starting to squirm, the thought of having to see him is making me more and more nervous as the time we arranged goes further and further past. Standing on the corner of this road I am gawked at by passersby, they wonder why I am stood out in the rain, pacing up and down in this corner of shelter I have found. A bead of sweat trickles down my jaw, or is it simply a drop of rain, I can't tell. My heart is pulsing in my ears, I can't catch my breath.
For you to understand this, I'm going to have to bring you back, all most two years.

...

Let me clarify a few things before we well and truly kick off. This story is not one of happy endings and fairy tales. There is no promising future of living happily ever after. Not for me anyhow. As a reader you might not like knowing that so early on, however I live by a certain mindset that I would rather have been given a full disclosure of the events you are about to come to know before they happened to me, some sort of guide book would have been fantastic. However in life things are never that simple. I have been tasked to write by my psychiatrist, Dr.Walsh. He seems to think that if I were to write about what has happened, it would be "therapeutic". As I told him, and have no problem telling you, I have no idea how this little exercise is going to go, Hell, I can't really understand what has led to this.

...

Recently, my whole world has come crumbling around me. I have had to bring my entire perception and mind under interrogation. My own thoughts have become completely invalidated.

You're supposed to be able to trust the word of a parent, right? I should think so. A parent should be the voice of reason in your formative years. They should teach you right from wrong, good from bad, truth from lies. As you grow older you naturally begin to question these lessons as you venture into the world outside of the bubble your parents have cocooned you in. You meet people with views on matters that seem so alien to you. Being brought up one way, and then one day, meeting a person that is so similar, but so very very different. I believe it is the stories that we have that define who we are, how we see things, what we come to do, often, if not always, is preceded by our experiences growing up.

Dr.Walsh said that it would help to "solidify the truth" in my mind. And I suppose he's the expert, not me, that's probably the reason why I pay him an arm and a leg every week, to fix me. But I don't know who I can trust. I don't even know if I can trust myself.

After how things ended at home, I have failed all of my college modules in my first semester of my first year. I have to submit an assignment in two days on Kant's essay Enlightenment, although I could be wrong about that. Drinking has consumed my every minute. I drink at work, after work, before and beyond. I held a five hundred euro note in my hand today, before I cashed it in for drink. Working in a pub for sixty hours a week probably doesn't help my case either. 

Every night and every day since I ended up out on my arse I have curled up into a ball on my girlfriend's sofa and lay awake until I get paid to get up and serve happy people drinks. I revisit it all, chase it round and round my mind trying to understand how it has come to this. Her family have graciously offered me to stay here while I get on my feet. I didn't ask, as it would be a lot to, this position was offered to me. Of course I accepted. Anything to get me out of that unpalatable slice of Hell I would call home.

Every evening she coaxes me to relax, to breathe relief. And as she leaves the sitting room to go to bed, I am overwhelmed by what I have done. The guilt and despair of leaving my "loved" ones behind is devastating. The processing of emotional trauma was never my strongest ability. I curl up and lie awake till morning rises, and in the morning she comes down to find me in the same position she left me in. The sofa cushion saturated with snot and tears. She is coming down to get ready to go to college, and finds her boyfriend lying empty in the morning silence, staring into open air, blank, vacant...it must be unnerving for her to say the least. I don't know why she puts up with me. She tells me that I frighten her sometimes, not on purpose, mind you, just with the way I speak. Maybe I am, frightening. Maybe they were right all along, maybe I am sick, maybe I am paranoid, maybe I'm crazy and maybe this is all in my he-...I suppose you will have to be the judge of that.

<End of Part 1>