I took various side streets, constantly checking that no one was following me, until I eventually found a bus stop where I boarded the first bus going towards the city center.
The bus drove through Laagna canal, which had been cut deep into a limestone plateau. I looked out from the rain-streaked window—hopefully for the last time—at the huge concrete buildings passing by. Relics of an era of poverty, corruption, and brainwashing. I observed them until I noticed a little child staring at me in the bus. He was staring at my waist. I realized that the handle of the gun was showing. The kid was looking at my face now. I lifted a finger to my mouth and made a “shush” motion. He looked away in fright.
When I stepped off the bus, it was raining heavily. It was about a twenty-minute walk home. I drained what was left of the whiskey in my flask, lit a cigarette, and began walking. It was a walk to the gallows.
I didn’t mind.
31
By the time I had reached my apartment complex, I was thoroughly drenched from the rain. I checked the mailbox. In it was a letter addressed to me—a rare occurrence. I opened it whilst walking upstairs, struggling with the envelope a little.
I stopped at my front door to read it. I stared at the letter in awe. It was an eviction notice. I had thirty days to vacate the premises. An involuntary smile crept on my face. It seemed that God had a sense of humor after all. A dark one at that.
Inside the apartment, I put the gun on the table, changed out of my wet clothes, and poured myself a drink.
I then sat on the couch and looked at the gun. It was a Beretta. It was tempting, but I decided to postpone my suicide until the morning. It was best to do mentally taxing things shortly after waking up when the mental faculties were at their sharpest since they got worn down during the day. And I could think of nothing more mentally taxing than the decision to commit suicide, which according to Camus was the only philosophical question that mattered. Since this was the most important decision that I would ever make, I wanted to make sure that I did it not out of an emotional fit of despair but rather from a logical conclusion. I would thus get to spend one last night in the company of my oldest friend—alcohol.
I took a drink.
They said that life flashed before your eyes before you died. Of course, that wasn’t true. It was just a Hollywood cliché. But seeing as I had some time to kill before killing myself, I decided to reflect upon the predetermined trajectory of my life that had brought me now to the miserable point where my existence would come to an end with an exclamation mark.
I took another drink.
So let’s start from the very beginning. First, the universe began. A bad move. The source of all our troubles. Eventually matter formed and grouped together, making planets and stars and so on. And on one of these planets, a disease developed. A disease called life. It kept evolving into more and more complex forms until one of its forms became known as humans. Inspired mainly by delirium, they ultimately overtook the earth, littering it with their deluded little offspring. And eventually, from one of these I was born.
I took a long drink and sighed.
I didn’t remember much from my childhood. Perhaps because there wasn’t much to remember. But what I did remember was growing up in poverty in a one-room apartment. Not that I minded it at the time of course. For how different everything appeared to the naïve eyes of a child… how acceptable… how meaningful. Children, as Giacomo Leopardi said, saw everything in nothing, whereas men saw nothing in everything.
I drained the glass and poured it full again.
My mother and father split up when I was seven years old. My mother got custody over me. Although I visited my father sometimes, he eventually moved abroad. Me and my mother moved a lot as well. I guess it was because of the poverty. In any case, I had moved house about fifteen times before I was even a teenager. That might have been one of the reasons why I never had any friends.
Eventually, I started school. I was an excellent student at first, getting straight As. This lasted for about four years. Then, for some reason, I started not giving a fuck. My grades dropped and my attitude towards school changed. I often got summoned to the principal’s office. Yet I was never punished for this at home. Nor was there much of an attempt to fix this behavior from my “parents”—for my mom had found another man by then.
Regardless of what I did, my parents seemed to ignore me most of the time. Sometimes they appeared to take an interest, but when I discussed with them my lack of interest in school, they couldn’t explain in any meaningful way why I had to make an effort.
Both school and parents were terrible motivators and I began to see gaping holes in the fictions they spun from an early age. As a result, I struggled to finish primary school. I had started with all As and ended up barely finishing it. I had to take the last grade twice. I played hooky all the time. I constantly went on cigarette breaks with the other malfeasants. Yet I never much felt I belonged with their crowd. Instead, I often felt alone. And most of the time I preferred it that way since when it came to being with them or being alone, the latter was the more comforting option.
When I went home, I usually watched movies. I watched on average three movies per day, becoming quite the film buff in the process. It was refuge from the misery of everyday life. But despite my love of movies, I had no tangible ideas about what I was going to do with my life. Although I might have wanted to be Kubrick, I wasn’t even capable of being Ed Wood.
In high school, I made an effort at first, much like in primary school. And my grades were good. At least for a while. But the arbitrary rules of the school system eventually got to me. I began questioning why I was forced to learn about subjects that didn’t interest me in the least, such as art history and music history, and why the subjects overall were so poorly thought. I asked my math teacher why so many times that one day she had a mental breakdown. She just couldn’t explain to me how things worked or why they were relevant. One was not supposed to question these things. They were supposed to be self-evident. But they weren’t.
Soon, I developed an interest in philosophy. After all, philosophy was all about questioning things that other people accepted as self-evident, which seemed to be the only thing I was good at. It may have had something to do with the lack of a fatherly figure in my youth. As did my disregard for authority.
One day I borrowed a book from my local library called Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. Although I hadn’t been much of a reader, I had read a book here and there. However, this one was different. It was the first book I ever read that wasn’t a thriller, science fiction, or fantasy. The book, amongst other things, was about the subjectivity of truth. About how there were various ways how to look at things. And how whichever way was common in society was a function of power, not truth.
I read the book during lunch breaks at school and soon began skipping classes. I borrowed more books on philosophy. I started taking long walks in nature to contemplate upon what I had read and to think about the world around me. Most of the things that I had been told whilst growing up were wrong, that much was clear. My parents, school, and society had all lied to me since birth. But why? I wasn’t entirely sure, but I was beginning to think that they had been lied to as well.
Ultimately, my interest in philosophy led to an interest in science. And though this interest would last for a while, it began making me more and more depressed. I soon came to see the people around me as unreasonable to the extreme. I saw their beliefs as fiction. Their reasoning non-existent. And the society that they had created as little more than an altar of lies where illusions were cherished instead of truths.