Personal Assistant: Limited Edition[MXM]✔

Chapter 37

37.

Ross

Sebastian was gone.

Nasir was dying.

I couldn't do anything.

People think if you are wealthy you have the world in the palm of your hands. You can buy anything and most importantly, you can make people do anything. Powerful men and women are always wealthy and they rule the world.

Growing up, I'd never aspired to be rich. I aspired to have enough to afford a comfortable lifestyle. Being wealthy didn't appeal to me. I didn't see the need to have too much money I couldn't keep track of. Becoming as rich as I was was a by-product rather than a goal. All I wanted to do growing up was create software. It turned out when you were really good, software could make you billions. Everything was technological those days. People were lazier. They used apps to get laid.

I went into college with only a scholarship that paid my tuition and got out of it with millions of dollars worth of investments not in a company but in me. My ideas made me money before I could even start executing them.

I didn't hate being rich. If I did I could just give it all away and lead a peasant lifestyle. Sometimes I didn't like being rich. I had to deal with people pretending to like me so they could get a piece of the money. My ex-boyfriend was sort of a wake-up call. Until then I was really naïve. I'd tried making friends to no avail and when he came along it was like he was heaven sent. Finding someone who accepted my quirks without labeling me and telling me I needed help felt nice. I'd thought we had something genuine.

I should have suspected something when he accepted all of the things people considered quirky without so as mentioning them. I was too happy to find someone who accepted me I didn't stop to wonder why he accepted me. He'd glossed me in his mind. He "blindly" accepted everything.

Don't get me wrong, I did want acceptance. Then any sort would have done. But through Nasir I learned a different kind of acceptance, acceptance so true it trumps everything. Nasir got to know me before he accepted me. He didn't turn a blind eye to my faults. He acknowledged I had faults instead of putting me on a pedestal. With all of my faults and odd behaviors he liked me enough to stay with me four years.

Through observing people in my life and those whose lives were displayed for the public to admire, I noticed a behavior that at some point in my naivety hadn't felt wrong. Unconditional love was great. Unconditional blind love was idiotic. When all I wanted was acceptance I would have taken it regardless of what it entailed. But what's the point of someone loving you when they don't acknowledge who you are? Is it love when they will never point out your faults or let you deal with the consequences of your actions?

There was something beautiful in knowing someone loved/liked you in spite of your faults. That kind of love was genuine. That kind of love was rare. People would rather pretend you weren't homophobic, a racist, a xenophobe or a murderer because you had a nice smile or sang really beautiful songs.

I didn't want that kind of acceptance anymore.

I never really thought much about people's behaviors because I didn't care much for them. They scared me, I disliked them and at some point I hated them. You really would too if you somehow always managed to mess up when interacting with them. When my aunt and uncle took me in I lived in some sort of hell. They were the bubbly attention-seeking people and I was this shy boy who hated noise, crowds, attention, found solace in collecting pinback buttons, loved solitude and spoke physics and math. They didn't understand and downright bullied me.