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I am not rich, but that is the least of my problems.
The bigger problem, is that I am not happy.
The pale blue piece of plastic curled around his wrist as Aaron pushed through the big entrance door. He had nothing more than a medium-sized bag in his hand that wasn’t even halfway filled. The first time he had walked through that door had been sixteen months ago, after the world had nearly killed him, three months of which he had spent waiting-listed until he was finally found treatable.
Fact was: Aaron was done. With school, with college, his degree, his apprenticeship. Aaron was done with his life. Sixteen months ago, they had sent him from doctor to doctor, including family doctors, alternative practitioners, even one faith healer, and finally a psychiatrist who eventually admitted him to a psychiatry with the diagnosis “burnout”. As a last resort.
Well, that was exactly how Aaron looked, when he took off: as if he had just spent sixteen months in a mental institution. His clothes were wide and simple, his hair messy, and the circles under his eyes were of a shade of violet that, depending on the room’s lighting, shimmered nearly black. Besides that, Aaron was not usually thought to be ill. He had often dealt with people belittling his nihilistic tendencies.
But people were like the biggest of houses with the smallest of windows and no one would ever be able to really catch the chaos within.
The sun shone way too bright for his dark thoughts, forcing him to close his strained eyes when he finally stepped into the practically empty bus and settled into the seat.
He leaned against the cold glass and suddenly wasn’t so sure himself whether they had released him or had thrown him out. He knew no one who had lived in a clinic as long as him, but he hadn’t really met anyone that bore a “burnout” diagnosis either. One third of his stay he had spent with denying his state and trying to walk straight out of the facility. Therapy had only just reached him at the last third. He couldn’t decide whether he was now out of therapy because he was actually incurable or truly healed, because just at the thought of going on with his life (a life that had first driven him into this state of absolute defeat) made him nauseous.
The world was full of people who didn’t want to harm anyone, ever, but whichever truly good-willed thing it was that they did, in the end, they did it only for themselves.
He was on sick leave for one more month, but Aaron knew that the world would collapse right before his eyes, when he had to fall into the same insane routine again. And he would fall, that he knew for sure. He already saw the scenario burned into his retinas, him trying to sort his life for one month eventually resulting in him failing and breaking for good. He would not be able to get his life together, not in one single month.
A disapproving thought, quick as lightning, manifested in his head and made him wonder what he had actually achieved over the course of the last sixteen months if not what he had been treated for. But he found that he had done and accomplished nothing for the entirety of his stay.
He keyed open the door to his apartment with a sigh, knowing full well what awaited him: closed curtains, darkness, layers of dust and chaos. He should be glad that his cousin forwarded his rent, in any other case he would now, not only metaphorically, be left with nothing. The door shut closed heavily behind him, and Aaron let himself be absorbed by pure darkness.
Burnout in his mid-twenties, how pathetic. He couldn’t remember when he had last felt something like happiness in this meritocracy. He felt like a moth. Even moths were butterflies who had turned lonely because of the endless hatred and futility of mankind. He was done with all the negative thoughts, but the negative thoughts weren’t yet done with him.
With slow motions and heavy limbs, he stepped into the shower and laughed at the universe’s macabre joke of him emptying both, his shampoo and soap at once. Nothing held him here, this apartment had stopped feeling like home a long time ago.
And while he shambled through his place, he noticed a piece of paper on his nightstand that was nearly blank. If the blind had not torn, allowing a touch of sun to warm the piece of wood and make the dust dance in the light, he would never have spotted it.
He remembered the list he had once started and never finished: a bucket-list enumerating things that he had to do at least once before he took a breath never to inhale again.
It wasn’t even a list. Actually, it was only two cues.
Paying a friend a visit who isn’t expecting anyone.
And writing a story.
Aaron had no friends, not anymore. He had had a few when he had attended college, but they had long forgotten about him. No one, not even his brother cared about the burned-out twin. Aaron wondered if they ever had, and came to the conclusion that he couldn’t even find it in himself to care. In addition to that, he had nothing to write a story about. There were simply no words left to say;
He scrunched up the list and was about to throw it head on into the mess that was his living room, but he found that he could not let it go. He stared at his hand that held the fragile piece of paper in an iron grip. Like a lifeline. And Aaron stood up and left everything but his list behind as he walked out of the apartment complex. It was way too easy to take the wrong turn, there was no point in paying attention to every single step.
He strayed for hours on end while the world around him became yet a darker place and he lost all hope that the sun might rise again. He watched it sink into the water of the river, and at this moment, Aaron would have liked to be the sun in its stead. He could die and at least the expectancy of death was worth a try. But he felt much too sober, so he sat still on the parapet, not following through and it felt like sinking all the same. Like music, the rush of the water underneath his feet conquered his thoughts. He wasn't manic, but nobody could be sure of what was real in this darkness anymore. Certainly, the light of the lantern behind him that the water reflected was real enough. He jerked around as his reflection in the water distorted and then suddenly, he was drowning again. Not physically, not really, but he had drowned in his eyes a thousand times before. He came to face another demon. A green-eyed one and he was more breathtaking than any fading memory Aaron had of him. He blinked and thought the dim lights behind him were playing tricks on his eyes. Alas, they were not, the creature in front of him was real enough, too.
Kevin had been someone he might have called a friend a long time ago. Kevin and he had gone to college together, at a time when Aaron had not yet thought about the futility of his very existence. It was hard to maintain a friendship once their lives had started to adrift. The present Aaron often-times forgot to cherish this long-gone time, it had been before his diagnosis and before he lost a year and a third to his condition. The calm before the storm. His fingers tightened on the concrete and he felt his nails splinter and break. He hadn’t seen Kevin since they had parted after graduation and consequently lost touch as Kevin pursued a sports career and Aaron himself became a doctor. And now Kevin stood in front of Aaron who had thought about letting go just a moment before. For a few seconds, they just looked at each other, like amber lost in an emerald forest.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” Aaron explained plainly and devoid of emotion, even though Kevin had not yet asked him about the state he had found Aaron in. He faced the water again, and Kevin sat down beside him, let him sit in silence, feet dangling off the edge of the parapet, like the lifeline Aaron didn’t know he needed.
And like time heals wounds, the chasm between their bodies was slowly stitched together again. With the ever-young mind of an athlete and the steady hand of a doctor.
“How did you do it?”
Aaron was the one to break the silence, but one look at Kevin’s face betrayed his inability to follow the jumble of thoughts that was Aaron’s mind.
“I don’t know,” Aaron tried to explain further, “looking at you, how you didn’t drown in self-pity, how you pulled yourself together and made it work. How you tried so hard to change your life for the better.”
He finally turned to fully look at Kevin only to find him already staring right back at him as if he was able to see into his soul.
“It made me jealous.”
Aaron went quiet at the sudden admission. Kevin had spent his whole life being second and chasing a goal that wasn’t his to achieve. Breaking out of that stupor and finally beating his brother made Kevin truly admirable. He had broken free from the dead-weight that had pulled him down. Kevin’s brother was dead now. It had not been an accident.
“I didn’t want to be like that anymore,” Kevin stated simply, finally averting his eyes, “that cowardice. That hiding inside the shadow of someone else. I didn’t want to live like that, not for the rest of my life.”
Kevin took a deep breath.
“So, I stopped. I just... stopped. I did it like it was easy,” he shrugged, “and then it was.”
Aaron nodded dismissively. He was hit with a sudden sensation of unworthiness. The list in his pocket dragged him down like lead, and it took everything he had for Aaron to stay on the surface. For a short moment he felt like Hesiod’s Atlas who had to carry the sky with nothing but his bare hands. The weight threatened to pull him down the parapet into the water and Aaron held his breath in expectation.
But the pull never came, instead he felt Kevin shuffling beside him. His voice was suddenly much more near, and also much more urgent. “You don’t have to feel ashamed. Not when you’re with me. Not because of me, and not because of yourself.”
It felt weird to talk to Kevin like they were still friends and like there wasn’t a whole life between them that always kept them at arms-length.
“Try, for one moment, not to think about who you are and what happened to you, but instead about who you want to become, whom you outlived and what you want to experience and you’ll see, that life isn’t so bad, is it?”
And Aaron knew that Kevin had fought, even if he hadn’t noticed then. The only difference was that Kevin had won and Aaron had not only twenty minutes ago thought about giving up. Kevin somehow caught his thoughts drifting away. “Why won’t you?”
Aaron scoffed. “There is no way to fix this,” he gestured vaguely, “people have already tried everything and nothing worked, nothing probably ever will.”
“Maybe, but I guess I know what you’re thinking, that you’ve already lost all your chances, but I don’t think so,” Kevin looked at Aaron with a sincerity that Aaron couldn’t place, “you don’t have a chance because you won’t grant yourself one.”
Aaron remembered that Kevin had once promised his twin brother Andrew that he would find something for him to build his life around in exchange for keeping Kevin safe. And Andrew did keep his promise. And Kevin did find something that made Andrew want to live.
And now Aaron was desperate enough to try and see if Kevin was able to keep the same promise with him.
Kevin looked at him, a sad yet hopeful tilt to his mouth.
“You know, I would have liked to make you smile today.”
A sudden realization made Aaron lose his balance for a split second, but before Aaron could have been afraid of falling, he felt Kevin’s grip.
Kevin had already kept the unspoken promise Aaron so pathetically hoped for. Because Aaron understood that there was nothing else to build his life around than the person who held him, not letting go until they watched the sun rise yet another day.
He had no friends, but whatever Kevin was, it was enough, because their shadows no longer looked like monsters.