Painting Flowers

"Give me therapy, I’m a walking travesty,
But I’m smiling at everything…"

Alex sighed to himself as he unlocked the front door – a 26-year old man, and still living with his mother. Working part-time in the local record store, attending night classes at the community college, he had no girlfriend, hardly any money and next to no friends. His good mood had been short-lived, it seemed, and he trudged upstairs, shaking his head slowly.

“How did I even get myself in this state?” He wondered, looking around at the messy bedroom that barely changed since he was a teenager. He had never really cared about school, instead devoting his time to music, writing songs instead of essays and playing guitar instead of doing homework. He was smart though, a straight-A student, topping every class with no effort whatsoever for the majority of his high-school life.

But something changed. He couldn’t put his finger on the exact cause, or find the point when things began to go downhill, but for one reason or another, they did. The shift was too gradual for anybody to notice at first, but when they finally did, it was too late. His grades slipped, then plummeted, from only dropping one or two marks to barely scraping a pass and resitting failed exams - the only subject he still excelled in was music. Eventually he simply stopped trying. He dropped out of school, attended college for a few months to please his parents before giving up on that too – he simply didn’t give a shit anymore.

“It’s my own fault though… I threw it all away, I was too lazy to even try to fix anything…”

Of course there were other reasons, but Alex would never admit that to anybody else, seeing it as a sign of weakness, telling himself that he was only making excuses.

Was it the death of his brother? He and Tom had always been close, Alex like a shadow to his older brother when they were younger. But Tom had moved out, going to university, moving in with his girlfriend whom he was engaged to before he died. Alex had never seen him happier, which made his death all the worse. It was an accident, but Alex couldn’t help feeling enraged at the driver who had escaped unhurt along with the bottle of Jack Daniels that was sitting in his passenger seat. It was ironic too, since Jack Daniels had been Tom’s favourite drink.

Was it the bullying? Alex had always been singled out by his peers, picked on for being smart, but he never thought of it as bullying – telling himself he deserved it. Bullying or not, it had certainly changed him. His friends had slowly drifted away, leaving the once popular and outgoing teen almost totally alone, an empty shell of who he used to be. Now he was shy, quiet and introverted, but there was no denying the fact that he was lonely. He would never admit it, saying he was perfectly happy by himself, but there was always that part of him that longed to laugh with another person, to feel somebody’s arms around him, desperate for that basic human contact.

Maybe it was just an amalgamation of those events, coupled with his near-constant feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy that tipped him over, pushing him down the slide into the mess he was currently sitting in.

But his father’s death had caused Alex to reflect on the transience of his own life, leading him to realise that, unless he got off his ass and actually made an effort, he would be spending his entire life in Baltimore, in the same house that he was born in. And that was not what he wanted for himself, and it wasn’t what his father or Tom would have wanted for him either. It was with that thought in mind that Alex had re-enrolled for college, taking the same psychology course he had taken before, in the hopes of becoming a therapist. He smirked a little now at the irony of that dream – perhaps he needed to see a therapist himself.

Sitting down on his bed, Alex picked up his battered acoustic guitar and began to play, a song already forming in his mind.