The Cellar

I had a recurring dream when I was a kid. In that dream, there was always a place which appears to be a cellar with my name boldly written on it. I was never afraid to go there, even though it was always dauntingly dark. However, a voice always objected every time I tried going in there with some other kid. It always said, "If you walk in there with your friend, only one of you will survive what's in there, and we both know that one would be you." Then I would refrain.....

And when I was a teenager, I discovered that not only was I adopted, but I was adopted for the wrong reasons. My foster parents adopted me merely for their selfish interests. I was so agitated that I ranted about it at school. But I had no idea my rants were about to paint the city blue. My rants got students prying into their parents’ lives, questioning the bonds they had with them all along, wondering if any were real. Unfortunately, an awful lot of them found unsatisfying answers and decided they were better off without their families.

And in the end, I got the streets filled with many family-killing degenerates without meaning to.

How I could have caused such widespread terror within such a short pace, without even trying, scared me so much that I went into hiding. But before then, I sought solace in the arms of my aged friend,

Mrs. Kate. She shot herself to death not long after I talked to her. And I eventually found out that, 30 years earlier, when she was still a nurse, Mrs. Kate used to give women babies who weren't actually theirs after birth, owing to her own family complex. Yet, she never shot herself to death until I showed up in her apartment just to cry about how I was raised by undeserving people; how I thought it would have been much better if my actual parents were afforded the opportunity to raise me.

Then what that recurring dream tried to tell me hit me. You see, some of us are just doomed never to share our pain because people would be inclined to enter our feelings a little too much, so that they would end up hurting themselves one way or the other. Hence, maybe that girl who only tells you about the good stuff isn't so shallow; maybe she just doesn't want all those beautiful features of yours to go down the drain prematurely, Matthew...