I Would Never Claim to be a Sociopath

When I was younger, I wanted friends. I watched the ones who had friends and adapted their traits until we laughed the same way. I heard Kyle, one of the boys who honed girlfriends, even in sixth grade, talk about how well he could rock the baby in the cradle and I put a Yo-Yo on my Christmas list. Unfortunately, I had the same level of skill at implementing new trends as Wal-Mart does and by the time my father taught me Walking the Dog, the children with friends had moved on to Pokémon trading cards.

Around the same time, I attended a church service where my parents listened attentively to a single mother shakily hold the wireless microphone (new technology, because god gives in mysterious ways) and proclaim the demonic history of those cartoons. “I found my son’s deck of cards and we sat in front of the fire while I threw them in, one by one. We saw horned faces rise in the flames. You see, the demons were leaving.” Luckily, for me, I was behind the trend and my parents were too behind on rent to present anything other than a dollar store Yo-Yo for Christmas. No demon faces in the flames for me.

I kept on with this drift of adaptation because my parents stifled my interests to fit within what they could pull from their box of Christian sensibility. Once, at a Disney store in the mall, I went through every pile of plush toys available and picked out witches, anti-heroes, and minions. My arms as full as a homeless man moving everything he owned into another alley, I approached my father and asked if I could have them all. He said, “Why are you drawn to the evil ones?” That was the first time I saw a mole grow on my soul of what I would eventually become.

Still, this trend takes place in modern day, as we all find ourselves adapting towards the swelling debt that creates adult versions of ourselves. Last weekend, a woman drank an entire box of wine, gripped and wept into my shirt. She begged me to love her and I backed away to smoke a cigarette while she said, “Please stay. It’s nice when someone is nice to you."
            I know the colors that make up love and how often the hue changes. I know that the lone wolf inside us will never admit just how lonely it is. I know that everything I want now will eventually change and then that will change and my emotions will continue to remind me of the metamorphic rocks I learned about in grade school that become completely separate beings over time. We are not coal being pressed into diamonds. We are diamonds being dulled by the crush of the mundane. These days, I see the demons in me and still wonder where that single mother thinks enflamed faces ran off to.