Martin Chang: Vignettes of a Broken Dream (First-person)

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Pasonia
Posts: 175
Joined: Wed Jan 13, 2010 12:43 am

Martin Chang: Vignettes of a Broken Dream (First-person)

Post by Pasonia »

3rd June. Morning.

I woke up once again, for the first time since about seven years ago, to nothing.
Before I even realise it, it was already past eight in the morning.

Nothing like a career to pack my loneliness with, although the altercation at the office was not my fault to begin with.

At twenty-eight years of age, I face several daunting prospects about my life.

The first of it all was that I lost a job, although, given the circumstances, it was actually great to lose a job where I'm being over-worked and under-paid severely. For what I have learnt either before or through the course of my work, I know of at least three friends who earn twice, or triple my salary.

The second was that I'm now a partner to a ghost... or Stray, as I have increasingly heard the kid as referring to themselves. That disgusting PDF - which I have completely converted to image format to save myself from a massive headache - said as much about them knowing about themselves

I've had no time and no mood to concentrate, too, on a third issue - this new Ether power thing. Frankly speaking, I'm not that surprised that I could remember well, since dad also had very good memory and had even taught me methods in which to pattern-ise the things I look over. But the new Ether thing gave me a completely new - and rather disgusting yet simple way - of looking at my powers.

Being that I was gifted my powers by a girl, I now have to make it a point to make a single portion more of offerings, though, I do wonder if she is still angry at me. I've already made as clear a point to her that I want to protect her. Not because I love her or anything like a pedo, it's purely out of duty and service to someone who assisted me in getting out of a rut.

More or less I expect the same from everybody else... but yea, humans being humans.
Ah. The morning chirps of the bird. I've not stopped to listen to them for years.

Come to think of it, I am still angry at that bitch of a crow for kicking me in the balls, but unlikely as it is for me to say this, I didn't expect female animals to be this keenly interested about their age.

Or maybe I'm wrong about them and they actually are not that different from humans, but still... hmm? There's something that looks like it's peeling off the wall... oh.

That letter... I can't quite forget it.

The Nihon Ki'in's invitational mail to me.

Miss Umehara was kind enough to recommend me to go years ago, but... well, dad got in the way. Says things that has nothing to do with anything - I mean, come the hell on, he wasn't even born until two years after the terrible war, and he is stuck onto every word grandfather barks to him about. And even when I finally managed to get away with my documents, that stupid car...

I still haven't brought myself to forgive Dad. I am acutely aware, in the depths of my mind, that Sinclair Davies - that guy who drove PD 4242 - took the blame for the accident in law, but in truth, if Dad hadn't insisted on making my life difficult by taking my passport away, I would probably be relishing life in Japan as a pro.

I don't think he's ever felt guilty for causing the accident, which makes me hate him all the more, but he's my dad. If word got out that I am being unfilial, the whole block of relatives will bay for my blood. To that reason, they even pinned the blame of my accident onto myself, saying stuff like "Hai yo Martin, tell you not to go Japan you still want to go, see! What's so bad about staying in Pebbleton?"

There's infinite bad... about never reaching my hands to a dream I was just a flight away from.
Just one. Fucking. Flight. Away. From.
*Poof*.
ZANNEN.


Stacking the pillow on my head and resting on the wall, I feel my eyes well up for a bit. The body is in sleepy comfort, but the mind is in a broken-dream limbo.

I feel like people around me don't understand me, and sometimes I look at the sea, I feel like it would be better if I just jumped and then they would be all regretful and all.

But that doesn't solve problems, and people would just call me unfilial again, throwing away the body my dad and mum gave me.

I simply can't live with that, let alone die with that.

I know more than anybody else that I have one of the most pathetic and soloist streaks to walk on planet Earth. But that's because I genuinely believe that eighty percent of this earth is filled with people who do not think about the things they do often enough.

When they don't, shit happens.
At best, it's scuffles.
Getting a little worse, this breaks friendships.
The worst of it is of course, war.
Anywhere in between is a pathetic piece of thing people call "politics"; you don't wage a physical war and try to kill the person, but you do discredit and destroy the person's credit altogether... or die trying, anyway.

Which once again, rounds back to me losing a job.

It'll be good to make a call in to Savanna Shipping, I guess... they're looking for someone with my exact skillset, and with that same fuckin' doubled pay my classmates boasted. I just hope they look at experience and not age, though... I ain't that old a fuck yet, I guess.

Well, that's that then. I can't be showing this side of me to the rest. Showing weakness is unsightly.

The rest can guess all they want what they see on my face.
As long as I don't believe it's true, it's not true. Even if it is true, I will make them believe it's not.

It is thus that, I, Martin Chang, am strong, boorish, and cold.

Even if most of what I just described myself as is a blatant lie, that is what I am.
Pasonia
Posts: 175
Joined: Wed Jan 13, 2010 12:43 am

Re: Martin Chang: Vignettes of a Broken Dream (First-person)

Post by Pasonia »

5 June. Downpours. I'm not singing in the rain.

I really didn't like anyone to be able to read past me.

I guess you could say it's a mind sports habit. Naturally, you don't want your opponent to grasp at a tell that you would do something. In any games that require minds in overdrive - video games included - you just don't like it at all.

So when Sophia did, even without knowing that doing it is bad, I still felt kind of... violated. Of course, what could a child, much less a child Stray, possibly do with knowing? But then she likes to blurt out what she could see - typical of children trying to grasp their immediate situation, but...

What was I supposed to say? "Don't do it or I will spank you"? That works on a living child, maybe, but even so, she's not my child, and even if she was my child I wouldn't have done it either.

So the only thing left to me is to just not talk about it.

I now kind of see why my dad is sometimes silent when I said silly things to him. Obviously, he couldn't react because whatever I had said weren't big enough transgressions to warrant aggression, and besides, only my mum had ever been cane-happy with me.

...

Yet, I can't deny it.

I've not fallen so hard for a girl before, even when compared to the obvious one-sided crushes I've had with other girls back in high school. I mean, four years is a long time to get lovey-dovey, but what sort of girl would have liked computer nerds and geeks back in an age of no computers, never mind that the chances now are still near zilch anyway?

We just had really similar interests. It was a bonus that she was gorgeous in person.

It's been like that in Go, and what different would it be in real life? The more you expect that the other person likes you, the more you'd be disappointed to know that you'd never been part of their lives in any manner. It sounds defeatist but hey, it's not exactly a negative fantasy either. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one in the Go community with this point of view... but eh, what do I know about other people, eh.

Well, all I can hope for is that none of this is for naught. I'm no spring chicken and thirty years of existence is rounding the corner in less than seven-hundred-and-thirty days, so...

Whatever. I can only wish myself luck I don't think I'd ever deserve this lifetime.
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