There was a constant thud every time Damien placed a can of vegetable soup on the shelf of the grocery store. His eyes glossed over like he was half dead, the constant repetitiveness of his task that he slowly kept stacking things over and over. Damien didn’t mind it, it's why he didn’t mind most of the things he did. Familiarity and not having any surprises, it made things simple.
Damien worked a pretty mediocre job though, it was the same thing every day and for the most part he wasn’t even treated fairly. His boss, the assistant manager, was a short Irish man with a red beard and red hair. To add to this, he had the temperament of an Irish man, on a bad day Damien could have stuff thrown at him for having a can of soup facing the wrong direction.
The worse part about Howard, his boss, is that he would poke and prod at Damien trying to get reactions out of him. Damien wasn’t sure on why, besides he just enjoyed the excitement of seeing the kid getting worked up. Howard thankfully wasn’t in that day, he had stuff at another branch he had to deal with leaving Damien to flow with his job casually.
Then his phone vibrated, Damien didn’t have any real friends but he did have an online best friend. Hatchet, Hatchet was about a year older than Damien but he had graduated high school already. He lived in the same time zone as him but for the most part worked a job where he couldn’t really text frequently until he was off work.
The conversations typically were pretty basic, talking about new meta’s in video games and discussing upcoming multiplayer games they could both play together. Damien always felt a sigh of relief when Hatchet messaged him, it reminded him that he still had someone to talk to.
With work slowly wrapping up, he made his way home. Usually the walk wasn’t too bad, it was just dark outside which always made him feel like he was being watched from the shadows. His house had sticky notes left, ‘dinner in the fridge.’ or ‘Got an extra shift not gonna be home till tomorrow evening.’ Today there was just an ‘I love you.’ Sticky note. Damien slowly peeled it off and sat it down on the pile of other sticky notes that filled a small wicker basket.
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Damien's plans for the night were the same as they always were, Sauerkraut and polish sausage and working on something he had been making for years, his very own RPG system and program for a video game he was hoping to make one day. Damien had been working on it for years now, teaching himself the coding and the programming one step at a time. His favorite part? Trying to break his own system, to see what was meta, to run diagnostics and tests to see what would happen if he had stats boosted to certain levels. It made him smile to run the simulation against bosses he created.
The most unique thing about the system? Its morale he created, the way it worked was everyone had good and evil stats. If you did good you were rewarded with specific skills. If you did evil, they gave you different skills. The worse you were the more secrets you unlocked, and vice versa. How he planned on implementing this wasn’t fully figured out just yet.
Damien fell asleep at that desk, it wasn’t a normal thing he did either. His eyes closed, his body still, but the nightmares came flooding in. It was a relived memory, one that came and went. Usually revisiting him in his dreams, the day he made an attempt.
Damien felt the cold bars of the hospital bed on both sides of him, his eyes dazed and his belly twisting. He could see the look on his parents' faces. He remembered it so vividly, something he had always tried to ignore and steer away from seeing.
The sound of drums in his ears, the sound of door slams, car engine and the sound of the old jeep cherokee that he never saw again. The bills and debit that was created, but most importantly how from that day forward no one looked at him the same.
Damien had a belief, ‘The eyes, you can see it in there eyes.’ The way people viewed him as the news spread of his action, it made the world feel so cold, so empty, but it also changed how they perceived him. Specially Lucy, the way her eyes looked pained by it sent daggers into him more then anyone.
Then, the dream would end and he would wake up. Startled, smacking his mouse across the room by accident. He breathed heavily holding his chest. He hated the feeling, he hated when the dream crept in. He was happy that it was over, his face went into his palms as he leaned on his desk wheezing. 3 am, dragging himself too the bed he dropped still in the same clothes he wore to school that day. His body began drifting as his eyes slowly got heavier.
He hoped that maybe tomorrow would be a better day. Tomorrow was finals, at least for some of his classes. Maybe, just maybe, he would finally get some good grades and end the school year on a positive note.
He was wrong.
