four decades of decay

There is a man. Well. Almost.

Pushing 40, but emotionally paused somewhere between a slammed door and an unresolved argument.

You‘d think time would have softened him, taught him the quiet grace of self-awareness but no.

He lives in a town just small enough to feel big in. Where being known is confused with being respected. Where his ego swells under the illusion of admiration, fed by people too polite to correct him. He walks like someone adored, like his name means something beyond the narrow borders of that sleepy little town, where the streets remember the sound of his teenage arrogance, where every corner holds a version of him still trying to impress a ghost.

He believes himself wise. Mature. A man of depth. But only because no one nearby dares to say: your depth is shallow, your wisdom is borrowed, and your growth is performative at best.

He doesn’t know they might clap but they also endure him. The men who smile through clenched teeth. The women who nod and play sweet, knowing all too well what festers beneath the charming smirk.

They know about the love-bombing, the withdrawal, the cruelty polished as detachment. They know about the way he lures, then withholds. How he punishes honesty with silence, and mistakes control for depth.

And yet he struts, convinced he’s the golden boy, while behind his back the whispers pile up like the bodies he burned left and right. No one says it out loud: that his presence drains the room, that he’s more exhausting than alluring, that the women he imagines dreaming of him are actually recovering from him.

But of course he doesn’t hear that part. He doesn’t stay long enough to. He’s already off to the next—younger, softer, easier to impress.

He likes them pliable. Early 20s, starry-eyed, frontal lobes still forming. He mistakes innocence for admiration. And by the time they begin to see the cracks, he’s already whispering into someone else’s ear.

Because a woman his age—a woman who’s lived, who‘s lost, who‘s grown into her spine—would laugh in his face. She would spot the rot beneath his performance. She would never, not for a second, call that sad excuse of a human being a man.

But the young ones, they don’t know yet that being carried isn’t the same as being held. They don’t know that compliments can be weapons, and some kisses taste like manipulation.

She will learn, too. His latest conquest—the girl who thinks she’s safe, adored, different than the ones before her.

She will learn the way we all did: through silence that grows louder by the day. Through confusion dressed as unwanted baggage. Through the slow erosion of self-worth masked as “connection”.

One day, she will blink and see it all:

the patterns. the decay. the hollowness behind his eyes.

And when she does, he will add her to the list—

another “crazy bitch”, another girl who was “too much”, “too sensitive”, “too dramatic”, “too focused on him”. Never once stopping to ask what he might have been.

Because in all his nearly four decades, he has not once held up a mirror. Not once paused to say: maybe it‘s me.

Not once knelt at the altar of true empathy, too busy lighting match after match and pretending the smoke is someone else‘s fault.

But make no mistake: he is haunted.

Every name, every face, every girl he burned lingers.

He doesn’t dream anymore—he will remember. And memory is a crueler companion than guilt.

He thinks he is loved. But even that is just another lie he‘s been telling himself since the first woman walked away and didn’t look back.

— Lux