Sogul

I drift in and out of sleep as I beg for the nightmares to leave me. I am one. I am alone. I have nothing in this world except the very people who share contact with me. They are why I continue to live. They are my oxygen. My pipeline to the social aspect of life, and without them, I am nothing.

All my life I was considered nothing. Sixteen years of boredom, unloved treatment, and daily routines of eating, schooling, sleeping, and prayers all adds up to nothing. Faith in God? No dice. Joyous and unconditional love from parents? Replace parents with a bunch of nuns, but the answer is still no. And forget about the other boys in the orphanage, they are as native to me as a tourist in a far away land.

The important ones in my life are the ones that are invisible to my eyes, which have not seen their faces ever in my lifetime. They know me as “Sogul”, a name that is not my own real name, and to others, they are nothing but a figment of my pure imagination—lost in the bowels of my conscience. My own real name doesn’t matter to you, or I. It could very well be a name of a dead person—for that is who I am—dead inside with nothing to live for.

Her name was Janet, and she was my friend. If we ever met in person, before our unexpected close online relationship, I would have blown her off immediately as some kind of hippie, drugged out person who let her life spiral away from her own grasp. I would despise everything that she was, or at least told me. She smoked. I did not. She had no structure as to a family, no normal nuclear family to live with, and although I didn’t either, I didn’t have a choice. She did. She was a mother, for God’s sake! A mother! I was just an orphan. I had no control over not having a family. She wasn’t married from what I gathered but I believe she had a daughter when she was barely out of her teenage years. What a great role model? I concur. It’s a disaster, and to her, it is a miracle.

I never knew love. I never understood the definition of it, and up until I met Janet, I believed it never existed. How could I know of it, or even understand it? My parents were non-existant in my life. Dead, I suppose, or at least that is what Sister Katherine told me. Although I wouldn’t doubt for a second them still being alive, living a full, happy life without me, because that is reasonable to believe—they must have gotten rid of me for a reason if they’re still alive today. I don’t know what happened to them, nor do I remember them at all. The first memory I have of myself is in the orphanage, and nothing else before it. Yet, Janet changed all of that. She was unique, uncanny, and unpredictable. However, she had instilled some sort of independence that I only dreamed about. She was morally acceptable in my world and if she ever had a belief in something (whatever it was) she stood by it through and through. I think I admired that in her when I first started talking to her.

Most importantly though was Janet listened to me. She was a grown up and I was only a boy, but she listened, and she listened well for a person of her stature. I could tell her anything—nothing seemed to faze Janet. It was as though she herself went through everything that I went through, and then some. She understood me, and because of that, I felt safe when we talked. I trusted her like no one else in my life. She was—everything to me, and nothing less.

“Okapi” and “Sogul” met one afternoon on an online message board. I was “Sogul”, a new member who hoped to somehow find someone that I could talk to, or at the very least pass my time away in my boring life at the orphanage. “Okapi” was a veteran on the message board, who accumulated over 5,000 posts. She greeted me in a welcome thread for me, and this is where our relationship took off.

It started slowly as if it was a train just leaving the train station, gathering steam steadily and slowly until over time, it was enough to steam roll through the countryside. The relationship between us was just like this—dawdling and secure. It first started just on the message board, replying to each other posts, making small talk in the threads. Then it went to private messages where we kept in contact for over two hours a day when I was able to get on the computer. (Sister Lucy, one of the nuns, who was the strictest out of all of them, and who I found to be displeasing and a fat pig, always monitored my time on the computer because of who I was.) Then there was a giant breakthrough in our relationship, phone calls that were made. It took a skilled charismatic speaker, and a witty story to make it happen and Janet was just the person to do such a thing.

The nuns at St. Vincent’s Boarding House had no idea what to think when Ms. Paschal came about looking for me one spring afternoon. Janet sent me an email, notifying me that she had already spoken to one of the nuns about some type of connection with me. I thought it was a joke at first. No one ever made any attempt to free me from my own personal hell—ever. How could suddenly someone do such a thing, and to tantalize me as such a free man, if only for a few short hours?

Yet, the idea stuck and the wait only lasted a week. Some how, some way, Janet was going to fool them in thinking we were related; alas I had a family after all—hidden away like storage. I was skeptical when she told me of the plan, unsure that it would ever work. It wasn’t as though I didn’t want her to try—I did—very much so. But if it failed and the nuns found out about who Janet really was, would I ever get to talk to her again? What if she ended up on How To Catch A Predator where Chris Hanson would appear and ask her a series of questions. But I doubted that would ever happened because I was unimportant. Who would care about an orphan? Certainly not Chris Hanson.

It was a Saturday afternoon in May when she arrived in a flower dress. It was white, with a touch of orange in it and it was beautiful to my eyes. Janet had arrived, and for the first time, I could see her in person. I could touch her! She was real, and not a part of my dreams. My faith in God strengthened a little, for doubt did encompass me a times to reveal that maybe, just maybe, Janet was a figment of my imagination. But here she was right in front of my eyes; no imagination could dream this up. “Okapi” was real. Janet was real. And a simple touch from her sent shivers down my spine, which rekindled every time I thought about it afterwards.

Janet fascinated me about everything she told me. She traveled the country with her friends after her high school graduation. They toured looking for small town bands ready to make it big.

Janet told me about her former boyfriend, the one who fathered her daughter. His name was Derek and he was horrible to her from what Janet told me. She told me how bad he was to her. She described countless times he beat her. This included the numerous nights where he came home to her with the smell of alcohol on his breath, and a stiff attitude that only an asshole would have after a night of drinking with the fellas, in which Janet couldn’t stand.