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Hazel eyes open to a rapidly dampening ceiling. It’s raining again, but that’s to be expected for a town like Normal. The weather is always gloomy, almost as if to match Angelo’s mood, but then again, he’d feel a lot more out of place if the sun were constantly shining its asshole beams at him.
Days like these, and there were a lot of them, really seemed to know how to drag Angelo’s mind further into his self-created abyss. His life is like a constant stream of nothingness. He’d wake up, pick a few pockets, then return to his shabby apartment that can’t even do as much as keep the rain from pooling on his bed.
Finally moving to place an empty pineapple can under the darn leak, Angelo tries to shake himself out of his stupor. He tries to focus on the sound of the raindrops collecting in the can, but that and the downpour outside starts to blend into one sound until all he can hear is noise. Nowadays, that’s all it is; noise.
This realisation wakes him up properly, and for the first time in a long time, he feels a pain in his chest. An overwhelming feeling that he just can’t seem to put a name to floods his system and he feels like he can’t breathe. Angelo feels suffocated on his own floor, in his own apartment, and becomes swallowed by his senses.
He starts gasping for air, desperately trying to fill his lungs with something, anything, before he ends up passing out in a pathetic heap on the floor. Gripping his shabby bedpost, he slowly steadies his breathing enough to realise that his face was getting wet. Leaning away from the tin in an attempt to cease the attack from his ceiling, he realises two things: one, there’s only one leaky spot in the ceiling, and two, the distance he created wasn’t stopping the liquid from dribbling down his chin.
Has it really come to this?
Was he seriously crying while having a panic attack on a day that literally anyone else might have considered a really nice day?
These questions spin in his mind as he scrambles to figure out why he’s even crying in the first place. He notices the pineapple can from his peripheral and watches the rain continue to drip with seemingly no plans of stopping. He matches his breathing with the steady pitter patter in the can, and suddenly the overwhelming feeling that was building up in his lean body escapes him. Much like the feeling of getting sucker punched in the gut, the adrenaline and pain he felt mere moments before simply stopped in its tracks, leaving him to feel numb once more.
He’s use to the numbness. It’s inviting and constant. It envelopes him in every moment of his day and it never seems to leave.
Angelo recalls when he first began pickpocketing all those years ago. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. It worried him that he’d get caught because of it, and he did on several occasions, but eventually the shaking became a part of how he was and the numbness in his mind made it easier to ignore. Even now, his hands are shaking, and while he was always subconsciously aware of it, it feels like he’s only noticing it now for the very first time.
He doesn’t notice much, he mindlessly recalls. He can't remember what he had to eat for supper yesterday (pineapples, likely), or how many wallets he swiped and stashed under his shitty bed, or, well, anything. He had simply been moving through the motions each day, thieving and eating just to keep his body from giving up, and somehow the numbness in his mind managed to keep it up for seven years without him realising.
Seven years. Seven entire years have passed since the night his entire family was ripped away from him in the blink of an eye, and what does he have to show for it? Perhaps this is all some sick joke and he had actually died alongside his family, but the water overflowing from the can and drenching his dress shirt tells him he’s not dead, and that this is all very real.
Maybe he was waiting for something, Yeah, that’s it.
But what was he waiting for?
He can’t take revenge on the people who snuffed out his family; he doesn’t even know who they were. Does he even want revenge? He supposes that yes, he would do it if only he were given the opportunity, but there was less of a chance of that than the hole in his ceiling getting patched. Still, maybe if he were to make them suffer the same fate he was meant to face that night, the numbness would end and he could finally find a reason to live.
During those darker moments when his mind starts to wander, Angelo ponders the idea that it would be so much easier if he was dead. He thinks back to that night. It was all supposed to end that night, but he was a child and all children want to live (probably), and by some dumb luck and a little on the side, he managed to be the sole survivor of his family’s massacre.
Why couldn’t he have just died that night?
Even so, he just can’t bring himself to end his life. The life that his mother begged to save. The one that couldn’t even protect his little brother. He can’t live with the guilt from being the only one to walk out of that house, but he also knows he couldn’t live with the guilt of throwing away his life after all this time has passed. Maybe it wouldn’t even matter, because he’d be dead and the dead can’t feel.
What does happen to you when you die anyway? If his family was robbed of their lives that easily with no obvious gain from what he could see, what would it matter if he died too? He wonders briefly if his family is watching over him, but he quickly comes to the conclusion that if they were, they’d pity the person he’s become, whoever that is.
And even though he knows he won’t, or rather can’t kill himself, the thought of not existing anymore puts him at ease. Closing his eyes, he tries to imagine it: a world where he’s gone. A world where he was never even born in the first place. A world where he isn’t sitting on the fucking floor like a child listening to all this noise.
It really is just noise, these thoughts of his. They won’t change anything, and they won’t make him feel better. He’ll just dwell and dwell and dwell until it kills him from the inside and he won’t be able to stop himself anymore.
Standing slowly to face the sunlight that peaked through the clouds, the rain having long since stopped, he realises that he feels no different from when he had woken up that evening, and this episode of his would mostly likely fade from his mind come morning. The numbness was still there (he wasn’t convinced it would ever leave), but maybe that was also a part of him now. Like the shaking in his hands and the noise in his head; it’ll probably stay with him until the day he digs his own grave but maybe that’s okay too.
Because he knows that deep down, none of this matters anyway.