The Man Everyone Forgot

There was one a man. He was a regular man, Nothing was extraordinary about him.

He was not the most handsome man but he certainly wasn't ugly. He was average,

Each morning the alarm clock would go off at the time it was supposed to,

It's sound would begin the man's day exactly as it was meant to begin,

He went and did all the things he was supposed to do  in the way they were supposed to be done,

At the exact time he was supposed to do them,

His social behavior was exactly as it was supposed to be aside from a bit awkward and nervous...shy as well,

But he spoke the words he was supposed to speak in the tone they were supposed to be spoken in,

He always stayed in the line he was supposed to be in,

He always waited patiently when that is what he was supposed to do.

He was clean shaven and kept his hair the way it was supposed to be kept,

He walked in the manner and direction he was supposed to and dressed just as he was expected to dress,

He fell in line with the herd just as he was supposed to do,

He didn't make waves and so he lived the life he was supposed to live,

But one day in the midst of a day being exactly as it was supposed to be,

Going exactly as it was supposed to go. Without anything out of the ordinary,

Something new, unexpected, something that wasn't supposed to be there sparked to life inside the man,

Questions.

What is this place?

Who decided how things were supposed to go?

Why do I care if I have a job, a house, a car, friends, a girlfriend, a wife?

Is that what I want? Will that make me happy? Will I be fulfilled when I have those things?

Or will I still feel lost and empty with something new to chase?

Why do I buy all this stuff I don't need to fill an empty space? Why does empty space bother me?

Why do I have to get drunk before I can be open with people?

Why do we all hide our feelings?

Why aren't feelings thoughts and passions something my society puts value on?

Why is it always money?

Why do I dress this way when these aren't the clothes I want to wear?

Why do I shave when I don't want to? Why do I get a hair cut when I would prefer it shaggy?

Do any of my friends really know me, really care about me?

Or am I just someone they keep around to keep loneliness at bay?

Does anyone ever really know anyone? Ever?

Why do I stay with the herd...fall in line when that's not what I want?

Why do I do anything someone else said I should do?

Why don't I decide what, how, and when the things I do are done?

I can think for myself better than most...why do I pretend I can't?

Why do I only say certain things that won't offend or shock anyone?

Why don't I unleash the flurry of shocking offensive passionate words that are full of life that live inside my mouth?

Why don't I let them dance out of my mouth in a shocking display of speech?

Why do I care what anyone but me thinks of me?

Why do I let myself be put into this slavery without chains?

Why do I let them keep me dead inside?

Why don't I choose to break free and become alive again?

Why don't I choose to be free from the heavy weight this life places on your back?

The more he thought. The more questions the man had.

The questions seemed to be infinite.

But there wasn't a single answer.

Each question only led to two more questions he hadn't thought to ask before.

They threw a wrench in his whole way of thinking though,

Drew the curtain on the world the man had come to accept as the world he lived in, the life he led,

This was very scary to the man and he felt as if he had come to a crossroads,

Either follow the questions into a new life a new way of thought a new world, the unknown,

Or turn his head and ignore them. Pretend he'd never seen them,

He chose the latter,

But what the man didn't know is there are things you can't unsee,

Thoughts you can't unthink,

Questions you can't unask,

There are lines you cross in life that you can't go back across.

But for a time the mans life went on unchanged and everything remained just as it was supposed to be,

He went to the bar every Friday after work with his work buddies,

They'd drink beer shoot pool and chase women,

He'd always get better at pool the more he drank,

The same can not be said for the women.

The mans friends were all good looking smooth talking seductive types,

They went home with a different woman every night.

The man was not the same. He did ok though. He didn't have great luck with women though,

He was always looking for a girlfriend, something committed and they just wanted a physical arrangement,

He took what he could get.

Besides they were almost always really good in bed.

The man seemed to have a knack for finding women talented in that area, no complaints there.

To be honest though he did it more for the intimacy however shallow it may be.

One particular relationship of this nature went on for a long time,

The man had developed feelings for this woman a while back,

They were getting harder and harder not to speak,

He knew the second he did she'd be gone,

The relationship would be dead and he would never hear from her or see her again,

There would be no loving embrace as she kissed him over and over saying I love you too again and again,

Romantic feelings are against the rules in a physical relationship,

In fact its the only rule.

Emotion is toxic to them and they die on the spot when they are brought into the open,

So like the questions he shoved them down as far as he could,

At least she was around like this. At least he had a woman who was intimate in some way with him,

But one day the man could take it no longer.

Those feeling were eating him alive because emotions don't like to be buried,

And will punish you for doing so.

He felt like we would burst if he didn't tell her,

So as she was getting dressed one day he told her everything,

Every thought every feeling everything he'd never said,

She never stopped getting dressed while he spoke, her back was to him the whole time,

She finished about the time he finished and she turned around and looked right at him,

She said "you are a really sweet man" and kissed him,

Then she smiled at him the way you smile at a cute puppy and she left,

He never saw or heard from her again,

He felt like he was dying inside,

He saw he in a book store sitting reading one day years later, but didn't say anything.

There wasn't anything to say. The moment of conclusion had come and gone.

The mans life went on and he still had his friends from work and their Friday night ritual he looked forward all week,

He also had friends he'd met here and there he spent time with as well.

He'd had some women that meant a lot to him, some he even loved,

He'd made love to a woman exactly four times in his life, each time with a different woman,

He'd felt that passion. that moment when intercourse becomes a spiritual experience,

The moment where two people melt into each other, their very souls intertwining,

Losing themselves in the act as the whole world melted away and became a forgotten puddle at the foot of the bed,

Two animals wild eyed and hungering for one another,

Letting themselves be consumed by the other,

Something that only happens when everything is perfect,

When it all aligns like an eclipse,

You can't just decide to have it. You can't go track it down,

It has to find you and you have to be willing to let it take you where it wants to,

The man always went, there was nothing else in life like it,

Not even close

It was something beyond pleasure.

The more the man experienced things like this,

Things that are different than they are supposed to be,

Life events outside the cookie cutter paint by number life it had been,

It brought the questions out,

Each time it was harder and harder to put them away.

The man got sick and couldn't work. He had to go on long term disability,

On his last day his friends all assured him he would get better soon,

They said that just because he didn't work there anymore didn't mean they'd get together any less.

They'd call him Friday and let him know where and when they'd be getting together so he could meet them,

The phone rang once on Friday,

It was debt collectors looking for the girl who had the number before he did,

But it laid there silent and still Friday night and they never called,

Or any Friday after that...or any other day for that matter,

As he sat there watching his phone,

The man felt a sensation like he'd never felt before,

It felt like some of him was dying,

Not from sadness or tragedy,

Not because of anything he felt inside,

This strange partial death came from outside of him,

Then he realized what it was.

He was feeling the moment he'd been forgotten by every person's memory he'd ever ceased to exist in,

To feel yourself be forgotten is an awful feeling,

To feel yourself matter so little to someone they forget you entirely,

The time you spent with them, the things you said to them, your voice, your name, your face, your essence....gone

Void of any importance and cast out,

He was feeling himself be forgotten by everyone who ever had all at once,

The man began flickering in and out of existence like a dying florescent bulb,

Then he became a million tiny pieces of bright white light,

Each piece looked like a tiny bug and flew around in a mass that was him,

It was static light like a TV that's not on a station,

He sat there dimming and brightening,

Sometimes not sure if he existed at all,

Sometimes unable to make out his hand,

After he morphed into an ethereal state,

The man could see right though himself like he imagined a ghost would look,

He felt them forgetting him one by one even some he cared for and thought he still shared a connection with,

Those hurt the worst. Those left scars. Even ghosts have scars.

They forgot him all through time, all the way up to his co workers and then it stopped.

Everything went back to normal so quickly he wondered if he hadn't just woke from a bad dream,

But he knew he hadn't been sleeping.

Denial can be a warm blanket sometimes when nothing makes any sense.

Everything changed after that moment.

He no longer understood the world he'd been in his whole life,

It was a lie. All those things that were supposed to be this or that,

They could have been anything. He could have been anything.

The herd was wrong. They had been fooled like him.

He was angry.

He stopped doing everything how it was supposed to be done, being who he was supposed to be,

He refused to take part in the lie. He refused to hide who he was,

He began speaking in any way he pleased saying the words he chose to speak,

He dressed how he wanted.

He thought for himself,

The man was breaking the rules,

He was upsetting the herd,

They wanted things the way they'd always been. They wanted everyone to be quiet and fall in line,

The man felt himself be forgotten by more and more people all the time,

He felt himself fading despite the life he felt blooming inside him,

As he came alive he died in the minds of others,

The world was erasing him.

One day the man left the herd all together and stayed home,

The man didn't want to be a part of the whole mess,

He no longer did things the way they were supposed to be done at all,

The herd was relieved to see him go.

The man stayed in his home all alone every day.

People stopped coming by,

People stopped calling,

People forgot.

So the man had freed himself from the herd but doomed himself to solitude,

He still had the questions to keep his mind occupied,

But he still didn't have many answers. A few more than he used to,

But many more questions too.

He searched for answers in every nook and cranny, under every rock.

But didn't come up with much.

It kept him busy though, kept him from having too much time to think about other people's opinion of him,

They thought he was a nutter, a freak, a hermit, the crazy guy who lives alone with all the roses in his yard,

The man had always heard that when you bloom inside when you truly come to life,

Your whole life gets better.

His had gotten lonely and sad, and was causing him to slowly cease to exist,

He was becoming a ghost,

An echo of someone who existed in the past but is no more,

Then the day came that was not unexpected by the man but he was not sure what would happen when it did,

The day that the last person he knew forgot about him,

The feeling came over him like water trickling down a cave wall,

The trickle of death,

But the man didn't die and if this was death it was certainly not what he was expecting,

He just faded out,

He could see the outline of himself but he'd become static,

Little bits of light free floating in existence blinking in and out,

He didn't know if he was dead, a ghost, seeing things from too much isolation or what was happening,

He knew not a soul remembered who he was anymore though,

That much he could feel quite clearly,

He no longer mattered to a single living soul,

He didn't even have a dog.

He was an echo.

He felt stranger than he'd ever felt, he felt like he wasn't even there.

He decided to go for a walk down town to be around other people,

As the man walked through the crowd of people on the sidewalk nobody acknowledged him,

They didn't even look at him.

They walked right through him several times, or at least it seemed that way,

He said hello to several people but they never even looked up.

HELLO???? He shouted

Not one person reacted,

They just walked along, snow crunching under their feet either in silence or talking on their cell phones,

He looked behind him and there weren't any foot prints in the snow,

He shouted some more, he got in people's faces, he kicked car doors,

Nothing.

The man knew for sure now.

He didn't exist in this place anymore,

There was not a single memory he still lived in, nobody knew his face, or his name.

He was a forgotten soul mourned by no one, mattered to no one and would never be thought of by anyone ever again,

And so when that last memory died he was cast out of existence,

Forgotten by the universe itself and any god that may or may not exist,

If a man lived a good life and was damned to become a ghost in the world he lived,

The man figured there probably was no god.

So he didn't bother praying his way into existence,

Even static echos have better things to do than do something as futile as prayer,

If there was a god he'd come get the man he figured,

He wouldn't leave him in this state.

Forgotten, no longer part of existence,

Unseen, unheard, uncared for without the possibility of change,

But god didn't come to save the man, and the world that forgot the man went on without a hitch,

The world never needed the man even when he mattered to some people,

Even before they forgot him.

The man never returned home. God knows what happened to it,

And all the crap he bought and filled it with to avoid empty space,

The man just walks through the streets cold in the winter, hot in the summer

He doesn't shout or try for anyone's attention,

He doesn't cry any more from the loneliness of such an existence.

He just walks all the time watching the world from the sideline,

Forgotten

Static

A Ghost

An echo of a man,

That ceased to matter and everyone forgot,

So he walks day and night unseen and alone,

A forgotten man.