Cool Trainer Andrew ♂, Day 22: And He Turned His Face To The Wall

Lickitung is gone now.  I finally released her from her pokéball and she’s gone.  That’s all I will be saying on the matter.

As for me, I’m afraid I don’t know what to do with myself.  I already had to beg my family to wire me money to pay for my motel these last few days, but I’m sure that I wear their patience thin.  They expect me to be a Cool Trainer, the golden child, immortalized in bronze over some league gym in a distant city.  But from what I can tell people don’t even respect Cool Trainers anymore.  Despite our best efforts all we receive is backhanded compliments and lips curled in jest over the name.  Many of my own family members are marrying into the Ace Trainer family.

But I’ll never be a successful pokémon trainer.  I’ve only got one lousy beast, Fearow.  Though formidable, I’ll give it that, nobody even gives a second glance to a trainer with one pokémon.  Even if I could catch more, I would probably ruin them like I did her…

She seemed so sad.

My own mind has become a torture chamber of sorts for my soul.  Phantoms float through the inky blackness behind my eyes, their faces wrought in torment.  I often awaken from my brief naps in a cold sweat, punching at those ubiquitous haunts.  But there is never anything there.  Just me.

I’m being forced to leave the motel this evening.  Where will I go?  My family?  No.  I can’t face them.  I’ve no friends to turn to.  I’m a lonely wisp floating by in the great universal wind.

I couldn’t even end myself.  I’m too much of a failure for even that.  I’d prepared the rope from a bed sheet, and had done the knot up the best I could.  As I stood on the edge of my bed, balancing on the precipice to freedom, my steps down that gilded road only brought me more pain.  The sheet broke and I fell with a crash onto the floor, a broken heap.

I’m not even master of my own life.  What good am I?

Above anything else I need to find relief.  Something, anything will do.  I’m off to the streets of Saffron, perhaps something there will cleanse my spirit. 

Dirge of the ancients,

Cool Trainer Andrew ♂