Story A Week (SAW) 10: March 5th, 2018
By Adam O’Sullivan
I’ve always hated Love. Love is a chemical reaction in the brain that causes people to act stupid. Love is compromise. Love is messy, and will distract you from the things you really want. Love is a means to an end. Love is convincing yourself that the person you fuck is the only person you want to fuck, because there might be the slightest chance that you’re the only person they want to fuck. Love makes me sick. Plus, she can be a real bitch. I’ve met her once or twice, and she walks around with that attitude of hers, like she’s all that, with her little cupids in tow. I never got along with those other kinds. Prancing around in the light, the attention, it’s just not my style. The dark is where I live. The silence is my chorus.
I have been around for centuries, like the others. I have watched and listened, seen you evolve out of the primordial ooze. I moulded myself after your needs and desires, twisted in the winds of your minds and imaginations until I found a form that suited me. You lot have worshipped so many gods, in the hopes that someone is watching, shaping your lives for you. Over millennia, the need is still the same. The desire to be heard. To be seen. Well let me tell you, someone is watching. SOMEONE is watching.
I am SOMEONE.
When you are alone, SOMEONE is there for you. The dark shadow you see out of the corner of your eye could very well be me. I could be making the rustling you hear just before you fall asleep. When you feel a chill on a hot day, there is a chance that that could be me. When you’re home alone and paranoid, every sound the night makes causing you to think the worst thoughts, SOMEONE could be crawling up the stairs to tuck you in bed.
I don’t work best in groups. My name is most often invoked for single people. The lonely, the heartbroken, the desperate and the despaired. They don’t usually invoke my name themselves. No, I will be summoned by their friends and family, the people around them who see their despair.
Your friend may be down after a break up and lamenting that they will die alone. Or they might have been single for a long time. Or they may have returned from yet another terrible online date. You want to be a good friend, right?
So you tell them “You’ll find SOMEONE. There’s SOMEONE out there for you. One day, that SOMEONE will find you.”
It seems so simple. You just want to make them feel better. From what I’ve seen, it’s a basic human need to find SOMEONE, and to want everyone to find SOMEONE.
When you tell a single person that they will end up with SOMEONE, that there’s SOMEONE out there for them, I get a little stronger. My manifestation solidifies just a little more.
You don’t realise it, but I am that SOMEONE.
When you offer your sympathies and tell your friend that SOMEONE waits for them out there, you don’t know if it’s true. You aren’t thinking about the millions of people who die without love, alone. The world is unfair. There’s not enough Luck to go around, though I have seen him try. If you ever do give a small consideration for the millions of people who have died heartbroken over the centuries, from loneliness, from despair, well, you’d hope that your friend isn’t one of them. Everyone should feel love. Everyone should be happy.
Everyone should find SOMEONE.
Love is such a first world problem. She spends her time in the richest countries, swanning around in luxury. Love hardly ever slums it in the poorer countries. There, people have bigger things to think about. Hunger. Health. Survival. Much hardier others for a world that has been forsaken. Some cultures don’t allow for love, they have the mating ritual sorted before the people involved are old enough to know what’s going on. They have reduced the act of bringing two people together for the sake of furthering your species down to a mechanical act. Like a baby making machine that only needs two parts. Those parts are picked from birth and shaped into the correct shape, so that they’re ready when the time comes. Free will is someone created by the ‘civilised’ world to give them an excuse to pursue hedonistic exploits. Where one person has free will, all have free will. You have uncertainty. Sure, most people end up with someone. The crushing need to have someone to call your own, to come home to, the same routines and familiar body parts becomes too much, and people tolerate each other. Most people can find at least one person to settle for them, to help them stave off the terrible thought that they will die alone. But not everyone does, and it’s not always by choice. Some people spend their entire lives searching for a person to be with, and only end up worse than before. Their subconscious screaming into a void, never to be answered by another living soul. The sound is like a siren song to SOMEONE.
Your platitudes might cheer up your lonely friend for a while, but sure enough, the fear will creep back in. The only true way to crush that despair is with Love, the stuck up harlot. A person may get better and feel good about themselves, and people around them may not comment so much that that person looks like they need SOMEONE, but there will always be one or two who can’t resist themselves.
I’m never out of work.
You give me power. When you offer your bromides, when you tell a single person that SOMEONE is out there is waiting for them – well, you’re right. I am. The despair of that person will grow. They will feel alone and hollow, whilst everyone around them is happy and offering their sympathies. Your happiness will widen the hole within their soul, creating a wonderful home for me to take residence in.
If you knew who I really was, and what I do, then you would never wish your friend to find SOMEONE. You’d wish for them to find ANYONE instead.
I’m always hungry.
You never say “You’ll meet SOMEONE someday” to a person you want to fuck. You’re not telling them “I hope you find SOMEONE” to a person that you’re in love with. No, you’re trying to work the situation to be that someone.
I hate when people try to muscle their way into my line of work.
For the perfect storm of events to happen, you will be married or in a relationship, so exceptionally happy. You’ll want that single person to be as wonderfully happy as you are. You’ll want to show them what happiness is, to impart a small part of your wonderful life, to give them hope, to make sure they don’t give up. But you sure don’t want to give them the wrong idea. You just want them to be happy, and not constantly talking about how sad an alone they feel. No-one likes a killjoy.
It’s so simple. You imagine a future where they find that SOMEONE, where SOMEONE meets them and loves them for who they are. I mean, you don’t have any interest in the person, but there’s got to be SOMEONE for everyone, right? Somewhere out there will be some loser who would end up with your friend.
You found someone, so it’s only right that your friend finds SOMEONE.
“I just know that someday, SOMEONE will appreciate you. That SOMEONE will love you for who you are. SOMEONE will never hurt you.”
That’s it, keep saying it. Find new and interesting way to work my name into your sentences. It becomes a chant. Said enough times, and in the right context, and my name becomes powerful. Specifically, it gives SOMEONE power. They say that if you repeat something enough times, you will believe it. Say my name enough times, and I am born into existence once again. Then I can make my way out of my hiding place, slithering and slinking through the darkness, hot on the scent that has been left by the desperate person. That person will be down, their energy drained by being told so often to wait for SOMEONE.
It’s no fun if they do find a partner. Nor is it fun for me if they become so depressed that they end themselves. I can’t do anything with rotted meat. Nor can I defeat the power of two hearts beating together, no matter whether they’re in tune because of love, lust, or pure spite. It’s like a house with an electric fence. You don’t care where the juice comes from, you just don’t want to fuck with that fence. It hurts.
One day I feel that final SOMEONE being said, and I feel truly powerful. It’s almost like you have evoked me, like multiple people have cursed the same person with their attempts to cheer up a person in their life.
I will follow the scent. I will find them where they live. I will wait until they sleep, and then I will creep into their house. Their lack of energy will be like a beacon to me, calling me out.
It’s surprising how often I feast.
I have been amongst you since your kind first learnt to express your emotions. I can’t remember the exact day I came into being, but I do remember being violently hungry. I tried to eat but was quickly defeated. I can only exist in the shadows and the darkness, and your kind had already discovered fire so it was easy to defeat me. I needed power. So I waited.
In Ancient Greece, I was called κάποιος. In Japan, 誰か is the name whispered in the dark and on the outskirts of human consciousness. In Hindi, the name कोई व्यक्ति echoes in my wake.
Arthur I, Duke of Brittany, found me in a small prison cell in Rouen. I should correct myself – SOMEONE found him. His legions of followers swiftly hastened my visit in the young man’s life through their continued and sustained desire for the young king to find SOMEONE.
I met with Dorothy Arnold, a Manhattan socialite, in 1910 after her parents lamented that she meet SOMEONE else, SOMEONE different from the much older beau that they had discovered her with. I was only all too happy to oblige, and be Dorothy’s SOMEONE else.
I have visited the world, and seen the depth of human life. You all taste the same, in the end.
Aren’t you all just waiting for SOMEONE to find you?
THE END
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