"Ten thousand people maybe more
"People talking without speaking
"People hearing without listening
"People writing songs that voices never shared
"No one dared
"Disturb the sound of silence"
Simon and Garfunkel, "Sounds of Silence"
"Sheesh!" she sneered as Albert walked by. "What's wrong with him?"
"Oh, him," soothed her friend, "He's like some sort of emotional retard or something. Doesn't interact with anyone." Silently, they watched him continue on his way.
Albert was an enigma. On one hand was his good paying job, a luxury condo and his oft-professed interests in poetry and the imagination. On the other hand, he spoke mysteriously of "bad decisions" and a vague unhappiness others did not fathom; a job to him which was only labor. And each day he died.
It was useless trying to explain. His family was comfortably blind. "Oh, he's fine. He has a nice car." A co-worker was incredulous. "You're unhappy? Well, you're doing good work." Albert even tried mightily with a therapist. "But at least you can hold a job," she asserted. "That's a good thing." "A job! Jobs are the bane of my existence."
To Albert, all things were meaningless. He couldn't explain who he should be because he did not know. He just knew he wasn't this. Why the good Lord had cursed him with such an impossible quandray he could not understand. Had his mistakes cost him his identity? No way of knowing.
The miasma of confusion eventually overtook him. The more he tried to explain himself, the more lost he became. He spoke less and less, coming to believe he was a nobody after all. He had just wanted to believe he was somebody, that he was special. After all, truly great people don't run away from life as he had.
In the end, he was driven by the idea of "coming clean". People had to know the truth about him. But he was a man trapped between who he thought he was and who he was. In one final stab to cut through the fog, he devised his own gravestone epitaph:
He was nobody."
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