CHARACTER BUILDING

I created another character this morning. Maybe I’ll put him in a story one day.

The dirty, little bastard wanted nothing more than to make everyone else feel as small as he did. His life had not always been a mess, but it had been for much too long, and although he was not the creator, he was the inevitable enactor. In all actuality, he likely had little choice in the matter, so he made the most of his predicament and sought to make people around him pay with hurt feelings and battered egos as a result of his own poor judgment and caustic tongue.

 He had not been born poor, or unloved, or unappreciated. On the contrary, his parents set him up on a pedestal, a little prince who could do no wrong. Perhaps that’s the reason why he could do nothing right. He knew he would never be in trouble, not really. His insipid father and self-depreciating mother might have tepidly scolded him for innumerable infractions, but their attempts to admonish him always fell short. They simply couldn’t bring themselves to hurt the little tike’s feelings. And so a monster was made.

As an adult he barked orders, leaned on his lies like a crutch, and said whatever he felt like saying, filters unbarred. The result was a broken marriage, estranged children, and more than a few affairs that left the women abused and his life bleak and empty. Food and alcohol became his friends then and he ate and ate, drank and drank, until he had gained pounds of unhealthy flesh. He had money though, from a trust provided by his parents and through more than a few shady dealings, and to that end, he was able to continue his squalid lifestyle until the day he could not.

On a morning that later he would remember crystal clearly, he looked in the mirror as if for the first time and knew he needed to make some changes. His parents’ golden boy had fallen to depths he could never have imagined possible and he was repulsed by what he saw. He could have ended it all, of course. He had the means: an arsenal of pills and a Glock 30, but auspiciously for him, he was without the wherewithal. In a rare and fortuitous moment, he crawled out of himself and sought help. It wasn’t easy, but he did, and after months of rehabilitation, days of dealing with his own inner demons, and hours of honing in on what happiness was, he met a miracle: himself. 

Judith DeChesere-Boyle (March 2014)