It's Not Easy To Be Me

One morning Marcel Muerte looked in the large mirror in his room. The image of a boy with green eyes, dark hair, no shirt, and blue Flannel pants stared at him from behind the mirror. He didn't know why a mirror was necessary for a desk set but he would never complain about it. The mirror was helpful for seeing any possible wounds and the desk had a hidden compartment where he had medical supplies. The latter was good he because if he spent hours in the bathroom cleaning wounds and was often getting medical supplies which would likely not be used if he wasn't a vigilante his family would inquire. Of course, he still used the bathroom to clean up wounds; he just pretended to be taking a bath or shower.

The night time vigilante looked at his arm. The deep cuts had stopped bleeding the previous night, however it was still very sensitive and he knew from past experience that if he simply wore a long-sleeved shirt the cuts would keep on bothering him. To defend himself from a possible Waterloo-level predicament he wrapped a pink gauze bandage around his wrist, putting the roll back in the hidden compartment on the side of his desk. A black shirt and Pink Floyd hoodie would soon cover that up.



Downstairs Marcel waited restlessly for waffles to emerge from the toaster. Jack Grayson (the teen felt uncomfortable calling him 'dad') was in his art studio, where he was since six thirty that morning. He was a freelance artist and was currently hired to do a album cover for a rock band that was on the fringes of the mainstream music community. Jessica (she insisted on being called so by her adopted son) was probably preparing to debate to a courtroom on the behalf of a ten year old who had been tasered by the police.

The only person in the house who he could make conversation with was six year old Jerry Lee Grayson, who was busy using crayons to color a tedious color-in-the-lines book. Marcel turned over to his brother- he definitely thought of the little boy as his brother- to make conversation before his waffles popped.

"Your drawing in Superman?" Marcel stated more than inquired.

"Yep," the small boy replied, shading a dark blue on the pants of the fictional superhero.

"I really like Superman. Did when I was your age, still do now. He saved people against all odds without caring much about whether he got out of it alive. His birth planet blew up and that the people who raised him died, which could cause someone to be bitter but he manged to move on to save the planet he grew up on. He's admirable for a made up guy," Marcel said. He thought to himself, He also had no vices like cigarettes, never failed to punish the bad guy, and never questioned his morals. He's who Desperado's got to be. He's who I got to be.

After a half an hour of eating waffles and quickly using a calculator to solve math problems which clearly stated to not use any form of device, Marcel tapped his artistic sibling on the shoulder, informing him that he had to be brought to day care. Jack was deemed incapable of taking care of the boy after he failed to look from his work to help with a fire started after Jerry left a piece of paper right by a heater.

After a quick walk down the street, Jerry went into the house that the day care was hosted in. The owner of the day care was Chelsea Anderson; a blond woman of twenty five who reeked of cigarettes and whiskey.

"So, you got my forty bucks Markie?" Chelsea asked of the seventeen year old.

"My name's not Markie. It's Marcel," Marcel told her, giving her the two twenty dollars bills left on the kitchen counter by Jessica at the start of every week. Without a good bye Marcel left, lighting a cigarette he secretly took from Jack's pack when he was down the street.



Marcel arrived at school early which gave him time to smoke another cigarette with his friend Caroline Majors before school started. Caroline often took her fathers cigarette packs and usually shared the pack with Marcel. On his birthday she would give him a pack to himself.

Caroline was sitting on a yellow barricade at the back of the school. It was a place where the teenagers did drugs and smoked cigarettes. The barricade was a distance away from the main substance using area, therefore making the two smokers separate.

After a short acknowledgment of presence, Marcel received a cigarette from Caroline. She was dressed up like Dr. Frank-N-Furter in skinny jeans and sleeve-tattoos.

"What's up Caroline?" Marcel asked his friend who had known since his early youth.

"I don't really want to talk, alright Marcel? Me and Jim got into a fight earlier and I feel like shit," she replied.

"Figures," Marcel whispered. Jim Falcon was Caroline's boyfriend and most of the time he was an asshole. He often yelled profanity at her in a drunken state of mine and kept on asking her to have sex with him when she was obviously not comfortable with it. He never managed to fuck her- not even without consent according to Caroline- but their last sex-related dispute involved broken beer bottles.

Marcel had asked her why she stayed with the obviously abusive Falcon. She never gave him a straight answer, nor did she seem to want to.

Marcel smoked his cigarette silently, deciding that arguing with her while she felt like shit wouldn't go anywhere. The cigarette or his own rejection of reality or maybe both lead him deep into his thoughts, nearly totally ignorant of the world around him. He was absorbed completely in his mind, nothing ever mattered outside the world in his skull. Reality was nothing more than a spectrum of fiction that was overrated and taken too seriously. Only his stream of consciousness, which was beyond all conscious control, was real.

It was an ever changing reality. Most times it would be center around superheros. They would be often beating up bad guys but it was never violent and no one got killed. Occasionally it would be a reminiscence of some childhood memories, even something as pointless as a Halloween when someones decorations scared him as a small child.

He always felt horrible after he was brought back to the "real world." Why did he get so detached? Was it possible to have a temporarily misguided sense of reality but not be crazy? Would this habit of slipping out whenever he was alone with a cigarette with nothing to keep his attention make him miss out on an important event like his child's first steps?

He felt this empty feeling after Caroline asked, "Why are you singing that?" It brought him into reality.

"Singing what?"

"You spaced out again, didn't you? You were singing, 'You are my sunshine, my only sunshine...'"

"That? Why was I singing that?" He had a vague recollection of moving his mouth to sing something but he couldn't remember what. I don't even have control over my body when spaced out, god damn it.

Caroline shrugged. "I only ever heard you sing that when we were like... five. It was a few months before your parents died, I remember that."

"Why was I singing it then? Do you remember?"

"You were singing it to some little girl after you proposed to her with a Ring Pop I believe," Caroline said.

"Really? I did that?" Marcel asked. However, he wasn't really puzzled. He kind of remembered it. Or at least he remembered her blue eyes.

"It's hard to believe you were a bit cute as a kid, eh?"

"Ah shut up," Marcel said, throwing down his cigarette but as the bell rang. When the two walked to the school Marcel asked, "What was her name?"

"I don't remember," Caroline replied. "It was an androgynous name, because I remember my mom asking if she was a boy or a girl after I told her the girl's name. She was blond with blue eyes but that's all I really remember."