Chapter Nine: From Marbles To Madness ---Fragments of a Dissociative Universe---

Before the drugs, before the streets swallowed me whole, I was already learning the architecture of survival. My first economy was marbles. What began as a child’s game quickly mutated into a primer on power. My friend and I engineered a betting table, a board with holes of varying sizes. The smaller the aperture your marble conquered, the greater your winnings. We had turned play into a system of gain, a microcosm of extraction.

But beneath the commerce pulsed a raw, desperate need to belong. Each transaction was a futile knock on a door I knew was locked, a child’s hope that the right price might finally purchase entry. The older I grew, the more the truth solidified: I was an outsider trading with natives, learning their language but never earning a passport.

The realization was complete: I was different. An outcast. It didn’t come as a surprise, more as a cold, final confirmation. I didn't accept it, not really... but I began to learn how to live with it, to build a life around the void.

I’d watch the other kids, their easy laughter, their simple worries about kid stuff, and I would just wonder. Why couldn’t that be me? Why was happiness a language everyone else seemed fluent in, while I couldn’t even grasp the basics? At that age, it didn’t feel like much to ask. Just to be a normal child.

When marbles grew childish, I graduated to sports cards. The athletes were strangers, their triumphs meaningless. What I coveted was the transaction itself, the cold calculus of the deal, the brief, electric rush of walking away with more than I brought. It was another syntax to master, another system to conquer in place of the human connection that remained just out of reach.

By sixth grade, my hunger could no longer be satisfied on the schoolyard. I set my sights on the regional library, a temple of quiet order with no detectors, no guards. I stole books with the clinical efficiency of a surgeon, slipping fifty, sixty volumes over just a few months. Not to read them, but to use them as currency, fuel for my growing empire of cards.

The collection became a monument, but the satisfaction wasn’t in ownership. It was in the proof: I could identify a weakness in the system, exploit it, and walk away unscathed. The power was the point.

It was during this time, still in elementary school, that I discovered the convenience store beside my school sold small, foil-wrapped chocolates filled with liquid. The label promised alcohol. I spent a part of my profits day after day, buying and consuming them in a frantic, nauseating ritual. I’d eat one, then another, waiting for the warmth, the blur, the chemical escape I was certain they contained. I endured the stomach cramps and the sugar sickness, convinced the next chocolate would be the one to deliver the promised oblivion.

It never came. I eventually learned the truth: they were merely liquor-flavored, a cheap simulation. The nausea was real, but the escape was a fantasy. I had been trying to buy a feeling that wasn’t even in the package. The whole endeavor was a perfect metaphor for my life, a desperate consumption of empty calories, hoping to feel an effect that was nothing but a lie on the wrapper. My taste for self-destruction was already on full display, years before I ever touched a real drug.

Just before that summer began, we moved to the apartment in Saint-Luc. It was there that my mother finally broke up with the boyfriend she’d had for the last six years. I had seen her kick him out before, only to watch him slither back through the door a few days later. But this time it stuck. He was gone, and with him, a whole toxic cycle.

Not long after, my mother had a second boyfriend. It was a really brief relationship. He was the only decent guy who would follow. He worked hard, had his own life together, and was into older women. He was nice, and I remember one afternoon when he and I went mud-trucking and shooting rifles... a great memory. But my mother broke up with him because he was ten years younger, and she was worried about being judged by others.

So instead, she started dating a fucking moron.

I wasn’t always on good terms with my mother. I never hated her, but I was angry. And that anger didn’t help with what was coming next.

That was the summer I turned twelve, though I wasn't twelve yet. The move to Saint-Luc, the end of her six-year relationship, it all happened in the months leading up to my birthday, a prelude to the brutal lesson I was about to learn about the price of hope. Because not long after that, she met the pathetic fucking loser.

And I need to be clear, this isn't the classic cliché of a teenager hating a stepparent for no reason. I am now in my advanced forties, and my opinion has not softened. It has crystallized. I have met a lot of people, navigated all kinds of chaos. I've known people who were truly evil, but he remains in a category all his own: at the top of the list of the most pathetic, worthless morons I have ever had the misfortune of knowing.

A man everyone but my mother knew was a fraud. Handsome in a faded way, that was his only currency. Beneath the polished grin lay a serial cheater, a thief, a liar, a narcissist adding another layer of instability to my already fractured life.

Not long after we moved, I found a wallet on the sidewalk. It was thick, an old man's, bulging with a fortune in cash. At eleven, I was already a cynic in a child's body. I knew the smart move was to take the money and vanish. But a stubborn, foolish part of me, the part that still daydreamed—clung to the idea that goodness might actually be rewarded. I was a child hoping for the best in people, even as I knew, deep down, I was dreaming.

So, I chose the dream.

The address on the license wasn't far. An elderly woman answered, her face softening with relief. She thanked me, said her husband was out, and insisted I return the next day for a reward.

I walked home feeling light. A reward. My cynical shell cracked, and for a few hours, I let myself imagine it, the validation, the prize. The world made sense.

The next day, I knocked. Nothing. Their car was in the driveway. They're old, they didn't hear, I told myself, the dream still flickering. I went back a second time. A third. Each silent response chipped away at the hope. Before the fourth try, I wrote a note with my number, a final anchor for my crumbling faith.

The last time, the car was still there. I slipped the note under the door and knocked. And then I heard it... the muffled television, and the slow, shuffling footsteps moving away, not toward, the door.

The silence that followed was louder than any sound. They were home. They had always been home. The dream wasn't just broken; it had been a lie from the start.

I walked away with a heat in my cheeks that had nothing to do with the sun. It was a burning shame of my own stupidity, a deep, sickening regret that coiled in my stomach. I had held a solution in my hands, enough cash to buy a moment of freedom, a shred of power, and I had given it away for nothing. For a lesson.

I didn't feel like a good person; I felt like a fool. The clearest thought in my mind wasn't about their cruelty, but about my own naivete.

I should have just taken the money. The cards. Everything.

It was what the world expected, and for the first time, I felt like a fucking  idiot for not listening.

Chapter 10: -The Endless Downfall