The Last Bully

Once upon a time so very long ago I was an innocent precocious shy boy. Cursed by an accident of birth to live in absolutely miserable poverty with my single neglectful alcoholic bullying mother. Yes, I was an innocent, but not fully. By that age I had already been through a number of horrifyingly traumatic experiences, and didn't emerge from the other side unscathed, but I was still a polite and nice boy regardless.

Keeping to myself wasn't just a habit, but my natural inclination. I hated violence, already having been a terrified and unwilling witness to the corpse of my beloved guinea pig blown up in my face by young modern-day brigands for their twisted evil amusement.

I had also faced certain death at the hands of a very violent and cold Mother Nature in the form of the deadly blizzard of 77 the year before. It's hard to keep total innocence when one has heard your very name whispered intimately on the wind by Death itself. Whether young or old, that will change you, and not always for the better.

By the tender age of eight, I knew extreme anger and terror quite well, and violence too, though had committed none myself. But the seeds of rage were there certainly. Because the things I had been through were of such a horrid nature. The beginnings of psychotic behavior were stirring within me by the time I met my first and last school bully, and possibly a world-ending style rage and potential for extreme violence. All these factors were already present, and just needed time to be painfully nurtured by the darkest circumstances, if such matters could be considered nurturing.

I didn’t start out bad or evil, but I learned too damned soon to adapt to it in kind. Responding perhaps as a tormented animal would react if pushed too far. Never forget, true monsters aren’t born that way, we are created, forged over time in both hate and callousness. Innocence was something I certainly started with, but it rapidly dissolved into something else; A dark attitude far more useful and realistic than mere innocence. A mindset far more adaptable to better deal with the world on its very own evilly-inclined terms. It was first embraced as a mere survival instinct, but evolved into a far more aggressive and violent version eventually. Before I ever came across my one and only bully, I yet possessed some modicum of innocence, but it wasn't destined to last., and would vanish forever sooner than it should have.