Brandon sat on the park bench, smoking his cigarette, watching people pass him by. He watched as every one kept their eyes averted, never returned a hello or good evening, walked their dogs, and laughed with their loved ones. He watched with dull, jaded blue eyes for hours as homeless people slept on the park benches, desolate figures for the most part ignored and without hope. He took one last draw from his cigarette before dropping it onto the pavement and crushing it with the tip of his weathered brown shoe.
He took this all in with the dispassionate persona of the typical city dweller. Life would always be life. In his eyes it was dismal, twisted, and artificial. Two people could cross paths, and their lives could be polar opposites, neither one altering other for he better or worse. The pitiful beggar would remain the pitiful beggar, and the young woman with her whole life ahead of her would continue to throw it all away on drugs.
He looked at his hands, observing the scar on his wrist from a biking accident three years prior to this moment. He’d flipped over an abandoned t.v and into another biker. He remembered seeing the blood coat the sidewalk and the shocking white pain of the bicycle spoke as it severed veins and crucial nerves. The painful recovery and physical therapy for months after, just to gain control of hi fingers again. For the longest time he could no longer eat right, drive or do simple mundane tasks. He was irritated, to say the least.
For a while he was content. Until he was diagnosed with cancer.
He stared at his hands, traced the skin on his arms with his fingers, waiting to see if he’d see things differently, passively wondering if maybe, just maybe that wave of realization would come. The classic, dramatic crumbling of all control, and the dark oppressing moment when he’d be alone, sobbing like a miniscule child with no one to turn to.
He felt nothing.
Just that same bleak clarity that he was just like the beggar. No one really gave a damn. If he went looking for pity, he may get sighs of falsified sympathy, and words meant to comfort that only sent one into an even deeper downward spiral. He looked out aimlessly at the street, the people nothing but blurs of color, unfocused and hazy.
At nineteen years old, his days In the world were numbered.
His mother was pretty well off, a financially rich lawyer. His father a doctor, also financially stable. Both too busy for their son. Just the way he preferred. No one would suffer his loss. Every one who had mattered to him had distanced themselves from him long ago, perhaps sensing that there was something very, very wrong.
He knew he was missing something. This lack of anxiety, this detached acceptance that his was slowly, surely dying just proved it.
Lack of compassion, lack of humor, and total lack of aggression were somehow disturbing to others, and he supposed he could somewhat understand. Because in a way, he knew that he should have some reaction due to the instinct of self preservation. He had to admit, it was a little odd.
In the end, he let all thought fade away, watching people live their lives, allowing himself to be the stranger that would fade from thought and memory.
