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| <<<>>> |
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The Sickness Within |
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| Created by Decius at
| [+ favourites]
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Akin was an isolated person. His daily routine consisted of exploring new ways to occupy his time. He lived off an inheritance and did not need to work.
He found social situations uncomfortable and never quite found a way around it. He discovered that the world around him had evolved in a social manner where there were many rules and methods in place that he was simply unaware of.
In his youth he had tried to mingle with people his own age, but found that the simplicity of his conversation did not work as intended. Most people, while understanding his words, did not find what he had to say very interesting even though he felt such thoughts should be of interest to everyone.
When he was in a social situation, for example, he would find it interesting to observe the changes around him that took place as people consumed more and more alcohol. And although he would quietly lean over to his neighbor to share his thoughtful observations, it repeatedly occurred to him that the disinterest returned was because most people didn't want to acknowledge in an intellectual sense why things were the way they were - they just wanted to go through with it and have a good time.
Since his parents died at a young age Akin never had to work unlike most of his peers. He believed that this was the nature of the digression in their thinking patterns. He often wondered if he should get a normal job in order to more easily become one of them. However, it became too pressurized a situation for him as putting effort towards frying potatoes or typing statements for people who he felt were more corrupt than himself caused his head to hurt.
He had long accepted that his thinking was probably a more advanced way of thinking, even though it led to a necessary solitude. Even with the use of the internet and his desperate attempts to find like minded people he found grave difficulty. People just seemed too complicated in their social mechanisms and he did not know how to overcome this for them. He reviled facetious conversation and found it nearly impossible to understand the motivation behind it.
Most importantly for Akin, however, was the roadblock of contradiction. He found that although people didn't intend to lie to him, their need to avoid asking the questions he did about everything around him evolved their mechanisms to be of a more efficient form of manipulation. It appeared that most of the things they said and did were symbols for some suggestion they tried to plug into everyone around them in order to cause envy and fear. This confounded him as he could not understand why it was beneficial to have people fear or envy him. On the contrary, he always seemed to try to make people around him feel comfortable.
Although he now had some peers whom he conversed with online once in a while, he found that their kinship was brought about by idiosyncrasies that made them outsiders to everyone else. However, this did not facilitate a very meaningful relationship as their individual quirks were not common and so they were friends only because they could be friends with no one else. This allowed them to converse about the nature of their isolation and distaste towards the rest of the world, but did not permit the discussion of other things.
Akin had become interested in plants and grew many of them in his homemade greenhouse. He enjoyed collecting rare species but was still a beginner in the realm of horticulture. He found that his dissapointment with the death of a plant was so great that it immobilized him. He could not fully understand why it affected him so much.
Lately he had begun suffering from insomnia. He allocated it to some stress factor related to his isolated state. He had been ordering food and supplies from an online source which meant he didn't have to leave his house for weeks on end. Even the delivery person was instructed to drop the delivery outside his apartment door and walk away. He had lied and told them he has a phobia of strangers in order to facilitate this arrangement with both the delivery center and his landlord.
Often Akin stood at a window and ate his food, staring out at the cars that travelled far below him. From the high floor that he lived on people became just a mechanism and he found that his own thoughts were just as large as the world outside his window. The motivation behind people's actions became simpler and simpler to him and each individual's own motivation shrunk in importance. He increasingly understood that people's personal desires and so-called individuality was just a mask most of the time, and in the end their decisions from the start to the end of their lives would be almost entirely identical. He found it both relaxing and utterly depressing to know that the people out there were more like mice to him, for he felt like the first and only human to have ever existed.
He noticed that his behavior was becomming increasingly desperate. Although he had had a calmness about him for the last year or two, for the last few months he increasingly began smiling at odd moments, breaking down in tears, and contemplating his own death. When he suffered from a sleepless night he would have piercing headaches in the morning and found that he despised taking aspirin to calm the pain. He tried to will the pain away but no matter how much he tried to ignore it only aspirin would do the trick.
It felt like every time he had one of those episodes he would suffer a severe defeat and feel demoralized the rest of the day. This, he believed, made it even more difficult to sleep the following night.
He started lying down in weird places for hours at a time. One such time he found himself on his kitchen floor with the stove on. He hadn't fallen asleep, but went into some quasi-conscious state where he became unaware of his environment. He found the humidity and lighting in his greenhouse to be calming and even though it didn't help him to sleep he felt he was amongst other living creatures which made the angst within him a little more bearable.
When he did sleep, he would awaken with a sudden influx of depressive thought. It was as if the few seconds before he realized where he was were the happiest moments for he was both alive and conscious, and not depressed. But the moment his memory took charge he became completely demotivated.
He had attempted to go out into public places, to interact with people in small ways, but they were nothing more than walking talking vessels to him. He knew that the parents that took their children to a park were just facilitating some psychological process that had little to no creativity attached to it. They were just a mechanism of nature, not exempt from its dictations.
One day, when he returned home, he decided not to take his shoes off. He carried dirt along his carpet and went to the bathroom. He felt very strange. He stood and stared at the mirror, his pants still down, and found what he saw completely disinteresting. He began to cry, as he had numerous times before, but soon stopped knowing that there would be no knock on the door and no call on the phone to elicit any sort of change as a result of his pain.
He walked into his living room and stared at all the furniture that was so familiar to him, that had his own scent attached to it. He lied down and fell assleep on his carpet.
When he awoke, it was night and the world was quiet around him. He felt the surge of depression ease through every vessel in his body and slowly got up. He walked into his greenhouse and found that there was an awful smell. He looked about and noticed that many of his plants were wilting, and many of them had died. His watering system had leaked and the entire system had been broken for some time now. He stared at his dead plants and saw that there was a fungus that had spread throughout the chamber and attached itself to many of the plants.
He walked out and sat at his desk. He heard the familiar hum of his computer and it made him sick to his stomache. As he turned on the monitor and a flash of light struck his eyes, he felt another piercing headache. He tried to will it away once again, but it did not work. He went and took two aspirins as this one was worse than usual.
When he awoke on his bathroom floor, he found blood by his face. He stood up drowsily and looked in the mirror and saw that his nose had been bleeding profusely. His headache had lessened but was still present. As he reached for the aspirin he collapsed again, slamming his head into the tile.
Akin was found two weeks later by his food delivery man and his landlord. He had suffered a stroke a few nights before his death and the aneurysm had spread chaos throughout his brain. It was likely the misshapen blood vessel that caused his aneurysm had been with him since birth. By the time he was found, everything in his apartment was silent, and all his plants had died. Any remaining records of Akin's existence were disposed of or sold over the following months and his apartment was rented out to a young couple who had just moved into the area who also enjoyed growing plants.
But not rare plants like Akin did. |
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| Created by Decius at
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