If I’m lucky, in a few days I’ll be unemployed.
I will be able to dedicate myself to writing,
And I will limit my exposure to humans,
Because above any other hope and goal,
I just need to be left alone.

For the first time in any job,
I’ve tolerated my current one enough
That I think some coworkers are fine,
In the sense that I can deal with them
Without wanting to kill myself.

I’ve had interesting dialogues with some,
And I can stomach the opinions of a few,
But no matter how closely I work with them
Or the personal details they readily shared,
I clearly avoid getting close to any of them,
And whenever my contracts have ended,
I have never missed any of my coworkers.

I wondered whether I had ever missed anyone.
No matter what kind of person they were,
They all seemed to have disappointed me.
I no longer retain the echoes of how it felt
To be in a romantic relationship that lasted.
I don’t know if I looked forward to seeing them
Or if I dated them because that’s what you do.
They never were interesting enough to me.

When my longest one ended, it hurt like a bitch;
I found myself wandering to known places
Like a beast following the instructions in its genes,
But in a few months, those aches faded away,
And I identified that trial as withdrawal symptoms:
I had become addicted to the pleasurable feelings
That trying to fulfill life’s purpose provides,
But it was just a run-of-the-mill addiction,
Like with any other drug.

I never felt an impulse to socialize,
I didn’t want to go to bars or parties,
I just wanted to get lost in my imagination.
Interacting with people made me antsy,
Not just because it caused me anxiety,
But because humans are fucking boring.
I could have been daydreaming,
Or assembling a fictional story,
Or remembering some show,
Or just enjoying the silence instead.

As a child, I struggled with unlikely nemeses:
I had to be wary of tender-hearted ladies,
Usually teachers or social workers,
Who loved words like ‘compassion’ and ’empathy’.

The teachers resented that I was alone,
So I needed to be properly socialized.
They wanted to add a good deed to the list
(It seems to me that feeling like a good person
Is for these people another kind of drug),
So they pushed me towards other kids,
Whether they were loners or settled groups.

I could have been spared meeting such kinds
Like a kleptomaniac and pyromaniac
With the strangest tic I’ve ever seen,
And who either killed himself or OD’d
Before he reached the fabled twenty seven
(To be fair, he wasn’t that bad of a guy,
Just doomed and truly fucked up,
But it doesn’t mean I wanted to know him);
Several girls who used me as a prop,
As in ‘look how good I am that I deal
With this gross, worthless, retarded loner’;
An overcompensating, anorexic girl
Who derailed every conversation
To remind people about how fat she was;
Coke addicts and hashish traffickers;
A boring sociopath who stole to steal
And hurt others for the plain fun of it;
A jock for who bullying was an instinct
Which he obeyed without malice,
And he was also a lying sack of shit;
A malignant narcissist who became a politician,
Who tried to ruin my life for many years
Just because I stopped hanging out with him
(Luckily he took himself out of the way;
He crashed his car on his way to a meeting).

There were others I either have forgotten
Or my brain has ended up blocking out,
But my point is that I first met those people
Because some soft-headed fool
Who wanted to feel like a good person
Smiled as she pushed me towards someone.

The less I say about social workers, the better.
In my experience, they are all Grade A morons
Who mostly see the world in ‘positive’ prejudices;
I had to be a good person, a social worker said,
Because I am a high-functioning autist.

You are also a good person by default to them
If you belong to other protected demographics,
No matter the horrible crimes some commit;
Start having babies of your own, idiots,
And stop babying adults.

Maybe I wouldn’t distrust humans so much,
Nor be so anxious whenever they are close,
If I had gone through good experiences with them,
But when even romantic partners have exploited
The very private pains I shared in confidence,
I just want them all to fuck off for the rest of my life.

Today I ventured to watch a movie at the cinema,
Which I had avoided since this virus thing started;
I have little interest in the garbage Hollyweird spews
(They don’t want to tell stories, just propaganda,
So I gravitate towards manga and anime instead),
But that new Dune movie seemed decent enough.

The movie was fine, the people were shit;
A group of tweens talked the whole time
Although adults kept shushing them,
But it’s true, these generations are hopeless;
They know they won’t get any consequences.
So I had to endure the rest of the movie
While I fantasized about walking up to them
And pushing their eyeballs into their skulls
(I often daydream about murder for relief).

Afterwards, as I walked my way home,
I tried to avoid the noisy multitudes
(I felt like I was being strangled
By a bunch of screeching cats)
As my brain wondered pointlessly again
Whether I’m a human being like them
If those people truly enjoy such tumults,
Are eager to surround themselves with others,
Want to get romantic partners, and have kids.

When I was a child, I thought they pretended
That they enjoyed interacting with people;
That’s what they were supposed to do,
Like my mother, and teachers, insisted to me.

Now that I’m much older, a grumpy man
That girls sometimes refer to as ‘sir’
(I hope they mean it in a daddy sense,
But it hurts because I feel eighteen inside),
I have accepted that I lack a part of my brain
That in others makes them want to socialize.

I guess those humans act like nature intends,
And most of them are properly happy,
While I’ll always remain an alien creature
That can’t connect with this species.

I’m a society of one, if such a thing exists,
And when I die, this whole history ends.
A man alone can never change a thing,
But I guess I can keep writing.

‘A Human Like Them’ by Jon Ureña