The Man Who Sold The World

You can't trust anybody, Logan. They always turn their backs on you in the end. They have better things to waste their time on, to waste their life and their love on. To them, you're not worth it. Do you understand me? It's a simple truth, and the only thing you can do about anything is to make them take notice of you.

The words circled around my head, imaginary sentences tailing each other before my intoxicated eyes as I lied down in the middle of an unusually barren street. Cars lined the street on either side of me, and others were busily driving hither and thither just a couple of roads down from me. And I just sat there, watching the lights of the city flicker around me, and took drags from a crumpled cigarette.

They were my father's words, taken from one of his earliest life lessons. They had been infrequent at first, the lessons, but he had taken them on with a fiery, drunken gusto after my mother had run out on us. Her last words to me were, "If you were a girl, I'd have named you Laura."

What's a six-year-old boy to think of such a thing, I wonder?
To my left, someone switched on their front room light which reflected ominously against a stop sign.

The only thing you can do about anything is to make them take notice of you.

I stood up with a new purpose in mind, and at the very top of my nicotine infested lungs, I began to shout the first song that popped into my head.

"I, I will be king. And you, you will be queen. For nothing will drive them away. We can beat them," I paused, taking another puff from my cigarette. "Just for one day. We can be heroes... just for one day."

The last four words were said with a quiet indecisiveness, but it didn't matter, not really. Already, people were poking their heads out of their windows and shouting at me to shut the hell up. After all, two am was hardly a time to be making such a din in a quiet neighborhood. Two am was hardly a time to be making important life decisions.