The schizophrenic Alpha-Male. | Seer. | Tell your story.
He’s living it up. He’s a seducer, a charmer, and has his way with women. He says the right things, makes the right moves, and the times don’t get to him. He doesn’t have problem reading signals or getting them. He doesn’t get obsessed with a single woman and indeed, doesn’t believe in the idea of ‘the one’. At least not anymore.
High school. He has seen her walk the halls before, but never thought much of her. She was pretty but had a cocky vibe to her, so he never bothered. Now she’s in his class and his better-looking friend starts a conversation with her. He joins in and immediately falls for her.
She reminds him of pain, of love, of all that’s good and all that’s innocent. She isn’t the cocky girl he thought she was. The way he felt with her, he never felt it before. He feels that connection and is sure that she does too. He was never a talker and was scared to engage, but he felt safe with her. She reminded him of everything that was, or could be perfect. He cries and laughs, and feels redeemed. But she is in pain from a past relationship and it doesn’t quite happen. He waits and waits, and gives up.
He is sure he’ll never feel this again. He is sure he was stupid and these feelings are childish.
As the Alpha Male stands with a drink in his hand, he thinks of his past and his feelings of being a ‘lost boy.’ Surely, now he’s authentic, more connected to reality and sorted. He has stopped believing, and it has liberated him from the chains of his stubborn mind and his delusional heart. He has always fallen for an idea, an image, an imaginary cascade, never a girl. Now as he sees girls for what they are, they fall for him. It’s a game of cat-and-mouse, he says to himself, with a smirk. There’s no yin and yang, just war.
She smiled at him as he was walking, sad and isolated. He couldn’t quite remember her. He went back and asked, and lo and behold, she remembered him from the event he attended at the University. Surely, this is a sign, he told himself. It’s an omen, everything happens for a reason, and it could definitely lead to something. He was more confident now. He talked to her and got her number. She had to leave and they couldn’t talk more.
But now she was all he thought about, day and night. He dreamed of laying with her, holding her hand, watching the clouds in the day, and stars in the night, while listening to songs that have always given him comfort.
She was goodness, kindness, and purity. A perfect image of beauty, inner and outward.
He mustered up the courage to ask her out. She was too busy at the time. But he didn’t lose hope.
He rarely saw her again. One time he did, they exchanged smiles and then back to work. He lost his words. All he could do was look at her and feel a bittersweet feeling that he vaguely remembered from the time he promised himself not to feel again. He couldn’t talk himself out of it, it chased him day and night and he felt helpless. His brain latched on to images and hopes and dreams, but reality was never his friend. “What is reality anyway? It isn’t love and beauty, it’s games of cynics and war for hearts of stone.”
And then it faded. Not completely, as he still latched on to a remainder of what he felt, the last gasp of his innocence. Now he’s of two minds and they fight for his sense of self.
Why couldn’t he ‘get’ girls? He read he asked, he thought. “Be a man, women like to chase, and all that. He was too feminine to be successful, he learnt.”
“The idea of ‘the one’ is an illusion.”
“Make them want you.”
And so it began. He did everything. Hit the gym, hid his feelings, and played. ‘Authentic connection’ is a lie. You don’t tell your feelings to women. You don’t talk about who you are, your pains, your insecurities. You treat them like brats. And seduce them.
He went to bars and nightclubs. He learned how to grab the pulse of the women he desired and make them dance to his tunes. He gave up his childish and stupid passions of music and writing songs; most of them were sad anyway and you don’t talk about sadness, and went into finance.
Women like money.
All the advice he learned was sound and worked. He knows the game and is on top of it. Nothing will go wrong. You don’t need to be a ‘special’ person, you need to play the game. And play he did.
Then came the second half of his mind to torment him.
Something was clearly amiss. You feel accomplished, but not happy. You feel like you’ve had your sweet revenge on the past you but lost yourself in the process. You had beauty, wonder, while others didn’t. But to join them, in the pursuit of what you thought meant happiness, you gave up your treasure, and sold it to games, to strangers on the internet, to hustlers who confuse thrill with happiness, to parts of life who never make you feel whole.
What was he fighting? Is it him who was in the wrong, or some things are just never in control? Or is it that in the process of learning to navigate life, he turned up the speed well past what was needed and lost himself in a sea of madness?
He knew he had seen boys uglier than him enjoying what he couldn’t, but ignored it. He was fighting a war and his methods were working. “If it works, surely, there’s nothing wrong with it.”
He was lying to himself and lying to everyone else.
Then it hit him. His snake-oil potion was working only on a certain kind of woman and only for a while. He was aging, and what was really worth it and desirable, in his deepest heart of hearts, made of his childhood dreams and memories, his hopes for liberation, his wistful longing for the whole, still eluded him. They didn’t fall for games. What they wanted was what he had always wanted but decided was a myth after all :
Authentic connection.
The Schizophrenic Alpha-male cried like a madman. The child inside him, the fearful, broken, innocent, beautiful, lost, kind, gentle child, that he thought he had killed; his ghost was back to haunt him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For suffocating you.”
He had forgotten what balance had meant. The lost boy looked for roads, and he took one. It got him somewhere, where he felt he wanted to, but not where he needed, to go.
What he got was never what he wanted. What he wanted was never what he got.
So he gave up what made life.
He gave up on love.
And he wasn’t a real alpha male either. He was a fake. He was what he thought was an alpha-male. He thought of himself and of life what he thought of girls. He projected an image, an idea, and never saw them as the people they are. They had to be either fairies or brats, never the messy human everyone is anyway.
His mask was still whispering things into his ears about how wonder was for children and how he was on the right track. But he decided upon a marriage.
No, not his own marriage. At least not yet.
The marriage of his two sides. His yin and yang. His mask and his child. Let both guide me. Let me tame both of them and finish the things that I started, things that made me alive, things that cuddled me when I needed it the most, things that soothed my isolation when the world turned its back. Things that make me feel whole when I felt empty. Things that reminded me of freedom, beauty, wonder, the latter of which I later dismissed as lies. It isn’t the child or the mask speaking this time; indeed, I let either of them take control in the past. It’s a new me. It’s a real alpha-male. One who’s driven, unafraid, and doesn’t play games to hide his insecurities. I will look for life again, and not see the things that made me feel alive as crutches, rather, things to be adored, desired, aspired to, and respected. And when they elude me, I’ll go off with a smile, on my way, always holding on to life, always seeking balance. I won’t fight. I don’t want to. I want to live.
He wasn’t sure of himself, but he wasn’t afraid either.
He left the bar and went home. He dusted off his old laptop, and opened an unfinished song he had written for the girl he loved in University :
On the stones, we make the mark
Of breaking silences
If you slip we’ll fall together
But we’ll never quit
We make our good times permanent
Let’s leave a little mark
Everyone wants to fight and run
But we won’t enter this war.
He hums along and starts typing.
Originally published at www.seermag.com on October 20, 2018.
