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Something probably went wrong in your head when you were a little kid, and now you keep trying to fix it.
Or, at least, that’s what the young woman sitting next to you at the bar said.
She said she had seen many, many like you before; aging, down on their luck, falling apart and leaning on drugs. She said she had talked to many when they were drunk off cheap booze, and that she had coaxed their troubles out of them, and that it was always something when they were a little kid. Their parents hated them, were cruel to them, and now something was wrong with them, and she wondered if you were the same.
Which was bullshit. That’s not your situation. Your grandfather (God rest his soul) didn’t hate you. He acted out of love.
So you had shoved her off the seat next to you and told her to mind her own business, that she knew nothing of you— because she doesn’t! Getting drunk and maybe looking a little down about it doesn’t mean you have an issue, much less one that dictates strangers poking at you over it, and if she were as "empathetic" as she claimed to be, perhaps she would know that.
And it worked, and she had left, muttering apologies that failed to feel genuine. You had not seen her for the rest of the night.
Perhaps, though, if she had seen you the next morning, she would’ve felt she was right about you.
That night was one of the first you’d gotten ‘can’t-feel-my-extremities-and-black-out-at-the-table’ drunk for a long while. The cleaner had nudged you awake the next morning when he tried to wipe your messes off of the table, messes you had been collapsed in.
You had tried to get snappy with him, then. Told him to leave you alone. But all you had felt as the words left your mouth was a deep sense of shame.
Something probably went wrong in your life when you were a teenager, and now you keep trying to manage it.
Or, at least, so said the younger adult who kept hanging out outside your house.
He was a psych student, one of the subcategories of such who think being halfway to a degree means they know everything that goes on in everybody’s minds with 100% accuracy. And as he spoke of his own teenage years (not that long ago for him), you noticed him creep into speaking about his puberty. And he spoke of it as though it was a body-destroying, soul-crushing experience; expecting yours to be the same, expecting yours to be the root of your issues much as he very openly testified that his was the root of all his. Did all of your problems start the day you turned eleven years old, too? No. No, they did not.
He ought to stop projecting his issues onto you. This is hurting you both.
The liking he had taken to you was an oddity, yes, one you asked him about but he could not explain. He had said he found your brutal scars ‘cool’, but that was no reason for the amount of loitering he seemed to do, so much of it with a notebook in hand. And he asked you about your problems, as though he would be able to comment at all on them. As though he knew anything. Compared to you, he’s sheltered. He wouldn’t get it even if you wanted to talk to him about any of it.
You hadn’t told him the things you thought nor felt, nothing about your youth nor upbringing, and yet he continued to assume your issues had begun around adolescence.
Eventually, it came out that he was studying you, like a lab rat, like a creature, like a captive. He found your personality ‘interesting’, he said, hands clasped in front of him as your own gripped the door-frame with hostility.
And when his final assessment involved some kind of interview, and he had asked you to be the interviewee, you had knocked him out cold.
He had gotten the memo to stay away. But you had still felt the strangest sense of… ugh.
Something must’ve broken your soul when you were an adult, and it’s baggage you can’t shake even now.
Or, at least, so said the pirate captain.
She had taken a liking to you when she had stopped in town, for she had grown up off stories of you and LeChuck’s glory days. She knew what this life could be like, after all, for she was in the same career.
She invited you to drinks at the local bar. And then she had asked if, perhaps, you’d rather a nice little café, and you had accepted that instead.
Though she knew what it was like to exist out there, on the seas, she knew nothing of the aftermath. She knew nothing of hauling a body that could not function as it used to, of how your memories still sting, of the night terrors you can never shake. She knows you go out there, you fight, and you die. Every pirate she’s known has died before they reached your age. You’re a miracle.
She’s noticed something about you, she said, when you sit divorced of all context of your identity. When you’re nobody’s henchman, and nobody’s first mate, and nobody’s captain; when you’re just a man clutching a scalding hot cup of coffee because you can barely feel the pain.
"You weren’t always like this, were you?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, you’re sad. Sad people aren’t good pirates, sad people don’t live. So what got you this sad?"
And you did not know what to say. For ‘sad’ is not a word you’d use to describe yourself, not ever, but it is not one you can construct a suitable defence to. You did not know what to say, so you opened your mouth, and you shut it again.
You suppose you ‘got sad’ the day you realised you were unable to work. Blasted out of the fortress, washed up on the shore, couldn’t feel half your body. You had known you were fucked as the waves washed over you, and yet, you had survived. There was a weight that came with that that you had never come to peace with. Hearing news of LeChuck’s fate; life, deaths, successes, jammed in through the newspaper slot. Considering returning, but he would never want you back, maimed as you are. He would kill you.
Truly, it was the fact that it left you alone with your thoughts that had destroyed you inside and out. When you were bleeding out and all you had was the company of your own mind, every time in your recovery that you knew you would not live, and yet, you did. Those moments ate you alive, threatened your composure dearest. You did not know how you had survived. But you had known, deep down, that you would never be the same from it again.
And she had gotten teary-eyed over your story, which was odd, for you were the one who had lived it and you had not once cracked in the retelling. She had apologised for who you are, what you were, what you had gone through, and you had forced her away. She had never gotten a drink of her own, you realised; she had been too busy coaxing honesty out of you with her grey-gloved hands.
But she had one last question for you.
"Did you say you considered going back to LeChuck? But I always heard he was cruel to you— why would you want more of that?"
That, you feared, was something you would have to dig even deeper into yourself to answer. So you did not. You downed the drink that had cooled in your grip, paid the cost, let them keep the change. And you thanked her for the chat, insisted it was over, and that you would not hear any more of her. And you left with your head down, ignoring the things she was still trying to ask you.
You returned home. Collapsed onto the bed. And tried not to think about your past anymore.