him

He is an accident waiting to happen. Like a ticking bomb waiting to go off.

He started off as a goofy kid-- always cooking up schemes in his head and looking for ways to make people laugh, especially his family. He loved to make the big family he grew up in roll over with laughter at his antics and jokes.

He was an intelligent kid-- gifted with the skills of drawing and gifted with early recognition of his dreams to become an architect.

He was an active kid-- often getting scrapes in the knees and elbows from too much outdoor activity. He held so much promise, had such good a life to look forward to...

He grew up to be a sullen introvert—bearing no resemblance to the goofy, talkative and rowdy child he used to be. He stopped drawing... flunked out (seemingly on purpose) of his architecture classes. Up to that point in his life, flunking was never part of his construction—he never failed a single test before. But, a desperate cry for help, one coming from deep within, drove him to skip the exams and cast aside his dreams. He felt that doing something this uncharacteristic was the only way to get the attention he wanted.

You see, the big family he grew up in turned out to be as much a curse later on as it was a blessing at first. He watched years and years go by as eyes gloss over him and ears tune out his stories and jokes. He never felt more invisible than he did at home, he realized bitterly.

The weaker ones always, somehow, got noticed all the time, he observed. And so he chose to be weak. In fact, he decided to be the weakest one of all.

He shaved off his own hair and took up the vices of smoking and drinking. He picked up cuss words, hung out with the wrong crowd, flunked out of school, drove fast and drove wild. He spoke rarely to his family, and retreated deep unto himself. He spiraled further and further downward, all the while thinking he had full control of the situation and could always turn back once he got what he wanted out of it. He couldn't have been more wrong.

Alas, he discovered, as time passed by, he did get attention—but it wasn’t the kind he wanted. He was looked down upon and yelled at—the attention he got was one full of comparisons to his counterparts. And he found himself failing miserably time and time again.

Indeed, he is an accident waiting to happen. Like a ticking bomb waiting to go off. And no matter how far everyone else reaches out, they cannot seem to help him.