My Villain Origin Story
cw: suicide
The short version is that my villain origin story is missing the bus. Now let me explain.
I am the type to always arrive at the bus stop at exactly the wrong time. Seemingly every time I walk up to the stop, I’m just in time to see the bus pulling away. In these moments, I do my best to steady my breath, remain calm, enjoy a bit of the (hopefully pleasant) Nashville weather, and wait for the next bus. If I have my headphones, killing half an hour or so is child’s play (public transport is not quick, this is The U.S. South we’re talking about). On this particular day, I budgeted the right amount of time to get to the stop at just the right moment, perhaps even a bit early. I walked down the road with a sunny little gait, checking my phone to verify that I really was on time. When the stop came into my field of vision, I was incredulous at what I saw. There was the city bus: it had actually come early and was pulling off.
All at once, I felt myself deflate. All the zeal I had to go wherever it was I was going left me instantaneously, like air leaving a balloon through a tiny pinhole. I heard the squeaky whizzing of that air in my ears, the shrill noise becoming the soundtrack to my inner monologue. The one time I show up on time, the bus is early? This was a targeted attack. This was confirmation that my missing the bus was never a coincidence, God or the Universe or whatever was out there had it out for me. As the bus began to pick up speed, I didn’t even think about waving my hands or running toward the stop, I couldn’t get over the fact that I had apparently done something to make myself the enemy of the cosmos. When the bus sped by, I felt the rush of its displaced air. I looked through the entire width of the bus, through the near and far windows, glancing at the lucky passengers who managed to get on. A deeply intrusive thought totally devoid of intention popped into my head. It had been totally within the realm of possibility to hurl my body in front of the bus. What would that have looked like? Felt like? I had no real desire to do anything like that, but the thought lingered for a moment as I pondered the target that was apparently on my back.
Casting the thought aside, my focus switched to the external. Suddenly I understood on a profound level one of the many reasons why people do bad things. I’ve always been adamant that the vast majority of people do not hurt people for fun. Desperation, trauma, unexamined and therefore untreated mental illness, any number of social factors can help explain why people do the “wrong” thing. But in this moment, I got a minute glimpse of what it felt like to be pushed to the edge. To feel as though no matter what you do, good fortune simply wasn’t designed for you to hold. To hold a grudge against no particular person, but against existence itself. Something as trivial as missing a bus flooded my mind with memories of every time in my life something was unfair, every instance in which I was unlucky. The decade of massive intestinal surgeries and weight loss and weight gain and IV nutrition and kidney stones and more blood draws than I could count. Having my late teens and early twenties tainted by the specter of my own mortality via chronic illness. The naïveté I wasn’t allowed to keep for long as a child because I happened to be assigned parents who loved one another but could never quite get along. Being gay and irreligious in a traditional Christian household.
I was reaching deep, deep within myself to pull out any memory that would cement my Cosmic Enemy #1 status. Things that I didn’t even realize were bothersome when they happened started to bother me. For example, the way I seem doomed to never experience close companionship with another queer man in real life. I know, you’re thinking “oh this one loves the drama”, but hear me out! My queer ex-neighbor once left a note at my door with his phone number, offering to hang out sometime. I was elated, because I’m always looking for queer men to befriend as they can relate to me in particular ways that no one else can. I happened to be in Texas at my parents’ place at the time, but as soon as I got back to town I would absolutely be in touch. That is, until he got a (really cool!) job and moved to DC before we could ever hang. Somewhere around this time, a new guy moved into the apartment below me. He was a Black guy, which was fantastic because I’m absolutely always looking to expand my local Black community. Doing astrophysics at a PWI gets lonely, after all. We happened to meet while I was checking the mail, and exchanged numbers. I got a text from him one day, saying he liked the music I was jamming to and that I sounded good. My feelings were: a touch of embarrassment that he could hear me through the floor, a touch of pride because I sounded good, and a touch of curiosity because my music was very gay. Could I be killing two birds with one stone? Queer friend AND Black friend? I wouldn’t even have the chance to find out, because my landlord had already sold the building. When our leases were up, we would need to find new places to live. It took weeks to actually run into him to get his number in the first place, and now we were both apartment hunting (which I did partially from a hospital bed by the way), and it was becoming abundantly clear that this was a wrong-place-wrong-time situation. I still have his number, maybe I should reach out? Table that for now. Anyway, you have yet to hear the one that cuts the deepest.
I’ve never really been comfortable in the realm of sex and relationships. I’ve never been on a date, and hookups have never truly sparked joy. It’s really the one area of life where I haven’t even begun to figure things out, aside from broadly knowing what my sexuality is. So imagine my surprise when a hookup actually went really well for once. We smiled, we laughed, and we actually kept talking after it was over. Yes, the bar is on the floor, I told you this isn’t my forte. Anyway, what was shaping up to be a very positive interpersonal relationship of some sort (hard to define what never materialized) was very rudely interrupted by this inconvenient little global pandemic. One minute we were making plans to hang out after spring break, and the next he was flying home to his family…in Vietnam. As you well know, the beginning of the isolation period feels like it was a decade ago, so there’s a lot of murky water from which to fish extremely unpleasant memories, but this one refuses to sink to the bottom. We did follow one another on Instagram before he left, which allowed me to make sure all was as well as it could be COVID-wise, if nothing else. A little while after the lockdown began, he informed me that he had gotten a boyfriend since returning to Vietnam. I couldn’t really be anything but happy for him, since as I said it’s hard to define something that never was. I can’t feel any anger or jealousy over something that was suffocated before it was able to take a true breath. However, I can feel jealousy over his country’s incredible initial COVID response. But that’s neither here nor there.
As I sat at the stop awaiting the next bus, all these memories hit me like…well, like a bus. It was so clear how people can feel compelled to do harm. When you have no specific entity to rage against, you simply lash out at anything that moves. If happiness clearly wasn’t meant for me, what’s to stop me from taking it from someone else by force? I imagined all the horrifically rash things I could do, all the chaos I could unleash, all the ways I could put out into the universe the same pain it inflicted upon me. From the relatively tame, such as knocking over a shelf at the drugstore across the street, to the cartoonish stuff of comic book villains. None of this was, for me, anything but wildy intrusive fantasy, but I understood how easily for someone else it could be made real. The difference between me and someone locked up for a long time is some amount of restraint, an amount I was only able to show because my circumstances were not that bad at the end of the day. What if I had been pushed further? What if I unknowingly had a condition that limited the restraint I could show? The bus arrived, late of course, and I swiped the student ID I was so privileged to have that guaranteed me free bus fare, and I took my seat. As the driver pressed the gas, the violent thoughts that had interrupted my headspace like droplets from a leaky pipe sourced from some evil reservoir began to melt away. The leak was fixed, and the waters inside my cranium returned to homeostasis. These waters are never crystal clear, I am but a human being, but I try my hardest to clean up the litter on the beaches that are my hippocampi.
That entire bus ride I silently planned out the core components of the piece you’re reading right now. I worried about the reception, if it would make me seem unwell. I’m not going to pretend I’m not unwell, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m working on it, I’ve got notes prepared for a therapist and everything. But I think this experience was a deeply human one, and it reminded me of a mantra I’ve held near and dear for some time. Extend grace, because you never know what someone is going through. Everything within someone can change in a split second, and sometimes it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the cards they’ve been dealt in the game we’ve all been dragged into whether we wanted to be or not. Oh, and the bus back home after I got where I was going? I just missed it. I vividly remember seeing a man get on who had gotten on and off the bus with me on the way there, a nice looking man in a nice looking coat. Maybe someday I’ll get the timing down like that guy. By the time I actually boarded the (again, late) bus home, it was dark. That was weeks ago, and I’ve endeavoured to write this piece ever since. I put it off, knowing that it would require me to once again loosen that pipe from that evil place, but that place is a part of me and pretending that it isn’t will only turn the leak to a full-on burst.