I wanted to be a healer, but everyone I touched got sick. Some got very sick – some even died. I know everyone dies in the end of course but it hurts all the same. It doesn’t help my reputation as a healer any if people die after I lay my healing hands on them, obviously! It doesn’t present me in a good light, and I’m annoyed by that. All I wanted was to be able to heal people after all. Was that too much to ask?
I was shopping for interesting things, looking at this, looking at that, checking out this, checking out that, and so on and so forth – the way you do. But as time went on and I failed to find anything even remotely interesting I became demoralised and discontented. I found myself growing increasingly impatient, frustrated and grumpy. All I’d found after four hours of searching was a pair of bright red shoes and some luminescent green shorts. Obviously the whole universe existed purely for the sake of making fun of me. Obviously it was all a malicious plan to make me look like a fool, to make me look like some kind of idiot.
‘What’s it like to be a human being?’ I wondered, ‘what sort of things do you have to do in order to be human?’ I wanted to be authentic, you see. Not to impress anyone else, you understand. It wasn’t for anyone else’s benefit that I was putting the effort in, just my own. I wanted to get to feel that I existed, you see. I wanted to feel that I was real.
‘Is that too much to ask?’ I asked myself, ‘is it too much to ask to feel just a little bit real?’ Unbearable anguish had overtaken me at this stage. Anguish had overtaken me like a runaway express train. Anguish mixed with longing, longing mixed with anguish. ‘If only I could talk myself into believing that I was real’, I wailed, full of terrible desolation, ‘even if it is just for a few paltry minutes. I knew that it was futile, however. I always know that it is futile. I know it as well as anyone ever knew anything, but that doesn’t stop me hoping! Hope is the only thing that stands between us and the beasts of the field, after all. Hope, my beauties hope – hope because that’s all you’ve got and all you ever will have…
I come from a long line of hopers. I come from a long line of hopers and – also – I suppose you could say that I am the last of that line of hopers. The very last – it will end with me. Only not really of course – not really because I just made that up. I made it up because I’m so very desperate to have an identity, any sort of an identity at all, no matter how lame, no matter how pathetically forlorn. That’s all I ever do – try to cobble together an identity of some sort to another out of all the bits and pieces that I find lying around.
You could say that it’s a hobby of mine. I think that would be a fair statement. I’m a bit of a hobbyist, you see. I’m a bit of an old hobbyist, only not really because that’s just another of my lame attempts to cobble together an identity…
