Delayed Transfer

Mark felt so tired, and he just woke up. Every body part felt so sore, and he knew that it was his fault.  He never intended to drink more than a couple of bottles of beer, but his friends kept pushing a bottle on him and were reluctant to deny them after not seeing them for so long. After a few hours, he said goodbye to his friends and insisted on going, saying that he had something important to do.

Once he arrived home he laid down on his bed thinking that he should have stayed longer and maybe that would alleviate his depression a bit but he had no money and he was ashamed to mooch off of his friends and maybe the little bit of pride he had left were reluctant to share to them his current status in life which he felt looks grotesque to others to him.

 Mark was obese. He had always been chubby since he was a child, even before his mother and he immigrated to the States. His mother was a server when she was in the Philippines and fell in love with his father who was a soldier in one of the U.S. ports. They got married and stayed in the Philippines until Mark graduated elementary school then his family went to the States. Unfortunately, his parents died in a car accident due to a drunk driver when he was in his third year of high school.

Mark had a few friends who were his neighbors when he was still at their house when his parents were alive. He had to sell the family house and move since they were poor, and he had no more money. He was living in a dingy apartment near the 7-11 store where he was working as a cashier. He had been working there for a few years even after graduating high school.

The main problem that Mark had with why he couldn’t get a better job was not that he was obese. It was because he was incredibly lazy and an otaku, meaning that he immersed himself in anime, movies, and web novels. He had always been addicted to the otaku culture ever since he was young, and Mark admitted to himself that he would never change. The only difference that he had with other otakus was, that he did not have a physical collection of the culture, like action figures or physical books. All he had was on the web. He was too poor to even think of starting a collection although that was his plan before his parents died.

When he received the call from his friends for a get-together, he hesitated to join but since it had been a long time, he decided to join. The hesitation came from the fact that he did not want his friends to see him in his current state, looking like a pig since he had gained even more weight from the last time they saw him, but he missed having a human connection.

The moment Mark saw his friends, he knew it was a mistake. He thought since they knew what happened to him he would, at the very least, receive sympathy and a bit of understanding but what he saw from their eyes were pity and a mixture of mild contempt and disdain.  Maybe he was just being paranoid but that was what he felt. Being half Filipino, Mark was not very tall. He was only five foot seven inches and being fat added to him looking much shorter and pudgier. His father, who was an American, was also on the short side, being only five foot nine inches and his mother was only five foot two inches.

He had always thought that he looked handsome since his mother was incredibly beautiful and that was the reason his father fell in love with her. Mark thought that if he lost weight, he would look gorgeous too although on the short side since he was lazy, his dream of being fit was never realized. Although he was fat, he was never slovenly. Everything that he has is clean which was instilled in him by his mother and thanks to YouTube, he knew how to cut his hair. Aside from cleaning himself and his things, he did not want to move away from his laptop and when he was tired, he would lie down on his bed and hold his phone like there’s no tomorrow.

One good thing about being an otaku is, that Mark would never kill himself. Even though he was alone, already twenty-five years old, and never had a girlfriend, he could not conceive of the notion of not knowing what would happen next episode of his many favorite anime or web novels. This was not an original thought since he also read it somewhere. He could immerse himself fully in the adventures of his favorite heroes.