Complications Often Define Us

  Everyone needs a hero.

  A proper hero, in the literary sense, is someone who helps the common man. Conversely, the villain should be a despised, unfeeling bureaucratic type. 

  The sanctity of the "hero" appears in some of the earliest known symbols of human culture.

  We are the heros of the old lion killers, when such a thing was noble and biologically necessary. That's what all that beautiful gibberish was about on those old, crusty cave  wall paintings.

  Part of all this feel-good nonsense was related to me by a unique person I knew once while living in student housing that just barely met the minimum standards of housing.
 
    I drew a picture of him, as if it was a police sketch, one time. Short hair, a sometimes scruffy beard, and a too-pale face on top of a wildly energetic, skinny body.

      He always looked appropriate in business-casual, day or night. He drank shit-kicking strong coffee at all hours, and often brought me unsolicited lattes, to my extreme delight.

      There wasn't any part of his face that you would ever forget. They always had laughter in them, his eyes,  even when it was sadness disguised.

    They said a warning to me, which I knew well from my own self. I drank in the irony of it.

          Don't trust me. Don't rely on me, they said, but you didn't want to believe it anyway.I didn't care. I loved not caring, then. He had that kind of effect on people.

        He never focused his attention on you for long.

      Not long enough, anyway. I wanted to do anything to keep that unkempt smile towards me.

    Obviously, I was way gone for him, although he was not a normal kind of attractive.I often felt a familiar thrill long before he walked past the place where I drank coffee every day. 
   
    Some people have a stronger than normal magnetic field. They consume and produce more energy than most people, I think.

      All the while(20 minutes, in real time) this crazy, inaccessible, brilliant, unbelievably charming man was reading furiously.

      That's what it would look like, if such a thing were possible.

  He studied every day to a continuous 10 minute loop of classical music. It had to be the same, precisely, so as to not interrupt his focus.

  It was hard not to laugh when he said this. Not because of the real benefits of classical and instrumental music on the brain while studying, or his diligence to his work.

    I smiled to myself because of the face he made while reading. It was a face with the vulnerability of a child, mischievious eyes, and affected seriousness.

    At that point he explained the thesis of that particular text, along the lines of that we as white European immigrants "romanticize" the image or remembrance of Native Americans because we feel guilty, and so on.
          I smiled back, understanding.

I looked down at the rough sketch, found a pale pencil face smiling at me, not judging, surprising me in my capture that long-lost hero of mine.