The door slammed open and Syd walked into his apartment. He looked around bewildered as if he was about to explode into thousand different directions. Syd turned around and closed the door quietly. He pushed his fingers through his wild hair and sat down. Then he jumped back up and walked over to his open window.

            “Stop” he screamed.

            His outburst echoed down the streets and through the maze of surrounding buildings. The people that were walking nearby looked around and some realized that the piercing sound came from Syd’s window. Those that looked up towards it saw a man standing erect and motionless. Some must have thought that he was crazy when they felt his cold stare. They saw a man with wild hair and wild eyes. From a distance, it looked like there were two black holes where his eyes used to be. This was due to his recent bouts with insomnia.

            Syd was not staring at the people. He was frozen in this spot and lost in his thoughts. He was not looking at anything specific but rather taking in everything that was in his periphery of vision. Syd stood very still by the window and wondered about a million different things. It was a grey day with grey clouds above. It looked like a rainy day but it was not raining. Syd did not mind rainy days. He enjoyed the after smell and the after feeling of rain. However, it was not raining and it was depressively grey.        

            He looked around at the tall buildings and cars. He did not recognize his neighbourhood anymore. Syd felt like a stranger in a foreign land. He felt an urge to cry but no tears came to his eyes. He cried in his mind while on the outside he looked stone cold. A cold breeze blew through the window and this shook him out of his stupor. He closed the window and fell on his bed. Syd looked up at the white ceiling. This seemed to calm him a bit. He just gazed at it for a while and no thoughts intruded his peace. Then one thought broke through.

            Syd thought that it might be nice to paint a dolphin on the ceiling. It would be something very positive to see every morning when waking up. His cell phone rang and scared him half to death. His heart was beating so fast that he felt it might jump out of his chest. He was in no mood to deal with anyone. He let the machine pick it up but it would give him no peace as it rang persistently. Now Syd knew the nature of the call. He picked up the cell phone and threw it straight at the wall. It shattered and fell to the ground. There was much needed silence again.

            Then he picked up his old radio from the ground and decided to find some music to ease his mind. He went through the stations, none of them had anything decent, and the ones that did quickly went to commercials and Syd could not stand commercials. He turned it off and reached for his CDS. He picked a random one and played it. A bluesy tune started playing.

            “Damned to be alone,” the voice sang.

            Syd knew this song very well. It was one of his favourites but now he felt that the lyrics were hurting him too much. They were very accurate regarding his current state. He turned it off. Syd went back to just lying on his bed. Then he started thinking about the fact that he did not mind being alone. It was when he was alone that he experienced the least amount of stress and no problems ever arose to upset him. He had plenty of books and music to keep him occupied. The social interactions had put him in this distressful situation.

            Syd started contemplating how he should finish the day off. He thought about painting, playing his guitar, reading…But he felt that if he started doing one thing he would be limiting the possibilities of doing something else instead. He pondered and then he imagined himself painting. He looked at his guitar and thought about writing a new song. He kept looking around at his books that were all over his apartment. He did not move. He just lay on his bed. There was not enough will in him to get up.

            He reached for the remote only to look at the pedestal where the TV once stood and realized that he did not have it anymore. In a fit of rage, he smashed it with a baseball bat and threw it in the garbage last week. That was after he spent days inside just watching television until the early morning hours. It drove him insane and he reacted with fury. He remembered what a liberating feeling it was when he got rid of his TV. He felt healthier.

            It was then that he felt that a new morning was rising. He could pick up the pieces he had created when he shattered his relationships with his girlfriend and the band mates. All he did was tell the truth and they all turned against him. He revealed how he truly felt and they saw him as their biggest threat and enemy. Syd was sick of pretending and appreciated truth and honesty more than anything else and there was such a lack of it in his social group. These people shunned any kind of thoughtful emotion and deep feeling. He could not stand it anymore and that night he let them have it. He poured out his soul and told each and every one of them what kind of a person they really were.

            It began when the band started getting popular. He did not mind the scene when they were mostly an underground band. It was very personal and artistic. The audiences were smaller and there was a personal connection developing between the band and the regulars. Then a major label approached them and the band really bought into it. Syd never did though. He
could not believe how willing the rest of the band members were to sign up and to be dictated to all the time. These guys were his best friends but they started showing their true colours around this time.

            Syd always loved music and lived for music. He wanted to cut out all the intermediaries with a website where people could buy their songs and the money would go directly into their accounts.

            “All middle men are bad” he once said. “All I really wanted to do was jump around, sing, and play the guitar but too many people got in the way.”

            That was then. He changed and decided to listen to himself. He wanted to do only what he felt like. If he felt like doing nothing then he was going to do nothing. He kept lying on his bed.

            He saw that when it comes down to it, his friends were just like everybody else. They were only interested in money, fame, and girls. Girls were all around them. That was how Syd met his girlfriend Emily. She was a model. He could not believe it at first that an angel like her would be interested in him. He was in love but when he came down out of the clouds for long enough, he realized that she did not love him. She was with him because he was famous like her and that was the only motive.

            Emily was the reason he was lying in his bed like a dead person. She decided to get to him somehow after his outpouring at the party and his disappearance shortly after that. There were rumours circulating that he was kidnapped. Syd was just hiding in his apartment and not answering the door or his phone. After he destroyed the TV, he called her and she said she
wanted to meet him. He had met her today and now he was feeling worse than ever. Everything was hurting him so much that he was purposely numbing himself by doing nothing.

            He went to her place and they drank wine while she did most of the talking. He stared right at her and saw straight through her. They were worlds apart. He did not know who this person was. She felt that they had lost touch but he knew that they were never in touch with each other to begin with. Then she started talking about what he should do and how he should
apologize and get his life and career back on track. This infuriated him and he could not stand the fact that a shallow, blonde model was telling him how he should go about his life. She kept preaching and told him that it would be good for both of their careers if they kept up appearances for now and they would actually, officially break up some time in the future. He jumped up, reached over the glass table and slapped her. He stormed out of her house and left her behind while she quietly wept.

            Syd reflected on all this and what turns his life had taken in the last couple of years. Something was wrong. It was not one event specifically. It was a build up that eventually climaxed when Emily just happened to be there and she was caught in the explosion. It had gone so far and it was growing out of control. He had no control of it and that frightened him. He got up, picked up the pieces of the cell phone and stuffed it in the garbage bag.

            He found his little black book in which he wrote poems and lyrics for his songs. He wrote, “You shouldn’t try to be what you can’t be” and felt that it could become a song. Syd picked up his guitar and strummed it for a bit but quickly gave up. Then he detuned the guitar and aimlessly stared into the distance while hitting the strings. His strumming became increasingly violent until all the strings were broken. He dropped it onto the floor.

            The desire for music, singing, and song writing was extinguished in him by the exhausting touring schedule that he had to endure in order to promote the group’s debut release. Performing the same songs repeatedly didn’t appeal to him.  He wanted to do new things but there was no room in the bands schedule among all the radio interviews, TV appearances, and concerts. They had a concert gig booked every night for weeks on end in various cities and towns. What Syd imagined as a fun and adventurous career soon turned out to be just another job.

            Syd was visibly burned out by the end of the tour and soon found himself under enormous pressure to record a new hit for the band. The band’s manager, the record company executives, and his fellow band mates bombarded him with questions and they all tried to push him to be more productive. This strong squeeze on his fragile psyche was too much for him to bear. His mental state gave out at the party first and then again, when he went to see Emily.

            Syd sat in front of a white canvas and picked up the brush. He dipped it in the white paint and drew a half circle. That’s’ all he could manage before getting lost in his thoughts again. He picked up a book and stared at its cover. He could not stop worrying about how his actions in the past managed to hurt himself and others. He was afraid that if he picked up and started doing anything it would produce some kind of an unforeseeable conflict in the future. All Syd wanted was a quiet life that came with no harm.
            He lifted his head to the light in the sky. The opening dawn shone on his face through the window. He squinted and marvelled at the morning sun. Syd longed for his childhood. He remembered how much he loved lying around lazily in the foggy dew.

             He got up wearily. A loud sigh came out of him. Syd started walking slowly like a zombie. He got to the door and gently locked it.