I hope you're already listening to Goin' home if you have the chance, because if this were a movie, this would be the scene where my voice in off teleports us with the help of an as-good-as-the-budget-allows-it transition from this shithole to a young couple's flat in Mexico with their firstborn lying inside a cradle. His little eyes already lost into the void and drooling all over his fist. All of this in sync with the song in the background, of course.

That's a pretty good transition song, I suppose. It sounds obnoxiously hipster, depressing, and the title Goin' home seems to fit perfectly. Even the album from that song—Where you been—was also released in February 1993, just nine days before my birthday, which is a cool detail. The problem is that in a more realistic 1993 soundtrack, I will always love you would be playing in the background of basically everywhere because people didn't want to let Whitney Houston nor the entire The Bodyguard: Original Soundtrack Album fucking go. That single spent fourteen weeks at number one on the fucking Billboard's singles chart, for fuck's sake!

Yeah.

By the way, I don't know the year we're living in right now, but maybe 1993 is a couple tens of years back for you too. I stopped consulting the calendar suicides ago (and it's not like time still works the same from my point of view), but I'm going to guess that in this scenario I'm past my mid-twenties—or I was, technically. If my face isn't entirely fucked up by the gunshot wound, you might notice that I unquestionably look(ed) way younger. That's because I stopped physically ageing when I was around sixteen, for genes reasons. I can see you reading the year 1993, then staring at me while doing the math and going "No shit this kid is actually this old," like everyone used to when I was alive.

Arseholes.

I'm sorry, I almost got carried away by my insecurities. Let's get back to the story.

So, we're now in 1993 in a small Mexican city known by its large leather industry that, not only helped the city to financially grow but also got its citizens used to wear leather clothes even in the hottest days of summer. I was born in that land full of snobs thanks to the sick universe's butterfly effect:

My dad, after he earned his Doctor in Veterinary Medicine in a southern part of Mexico, he decided to look for a job somewhere else. Thanks to one of his friends, he took a nine hours bus ride to this mentioned, pretentious city where he found old, wealthy tanners who needed vets to take care of their bovines. Time passed, and my dad met a skinny, blonde nurse raised in a country family, and after a year—well, love just happened. They decided to move together, and love kept happening. Then, when the no-longer nurse but a well-known vet's housewife tried to get pregnant—she sadly lost both her first and second unborn babies during the first months inside the womb.

Third strike—I was born.

When my father told me that story, he mentioned that he believed those two natural abortions happened because I was inevitably chosen by the forces of the universe since the beginning of times to be born, but I think it was just me all along, just killing myself inside the womb.

"So here I am, motherfucker! Thanks to your stupid forces since the beginning of time, so why don't you let me go now?! What the hell did you fuck up, arsehole?!"

...

But anyway, I was born, and now the vet thought life was perfect, but his wife turned into a psycho whose only commitment to the family became using credit cards to leave all of us in bankruptcy (twice) while ignoring all possible responsibilities. And I don't know how my father's self-esteem worked, but he never divorced that w- woman... and not only that but he was also brave (or stupid) enough to impregnate her two more times. A boy and a girl. That makes four persons living in constant fear of a crazy woman until we were old enough to leave that house, and my father to leave this life.

Even though I didn't grow up with the love of a mother, I think my childhood wasn't that bad. The only detail was that during my first months and years of existence, my father thought I was some kind of genius just because I learnt to speak and read way earlier than the average children. Thanks to that, he unintentionally decided to teach me how to live inside a bubble. He gave me books, movies, music, computers and the best tutors to the point that I learnt to be passionate about gathering what I call useless knowledge—facts and dates and names and definitions I never used. But even as a kid, I started to notice my big problems with logic and with understanding how basic human behaviour and communication worked.

My father thought I was some sort of genius, but I was just there at a young age reading his encyclopaedias and realising I had some kind of autism.

There was a brief moment in life when I said I wanted to be a doctor, but the sole reason I liked school was that I was reading all the time (and that's not always a good thing. Not if the child is entirely avoiding reality). I was only checking books out of the library and writing every day, but getting mediocre grades in every single class.

Music class was the only one I paid meticulous attention to because my dad used to wake me up every single day an hour earlier so we could stay inside the car, outside the school, listening to different music genres. He'd fill my brain with even more useless knowledge about music theory and musicians that I... actually enjoyed so fucking much.

When he became aware of this interest of mine, he gifted me an acoustic Fender on my sixth birthday that I quickly learnt to play, and before graduating from elementary school, I decided to give up on my brief dream of becoming a doctor.

No one saw it coming, but I decided to become something else.