When he got home he laid on his couch and stared at the ceiling, not wanting to get online until he had at least done some work on his poem for the day but he couldn't stop thinking about Sarah. She had seemed so nonchalant, the mood he was trying to reach in himself, he felt like she understood what he was trying to say even if he said it badly which he felt was all the time. He convinced himself that she was too good for him, he was unkempt, pessimistic and struggled to communicate his thoughts and open himself up to strangers while she was clean, polite and with a self confident air about her, he never could have approached a stranger the way she did, believing this was mostly due to how much more attractive she was than him. She probably does this all the time, opens up conversations with strangers without any agenda or hiding of her true self while this was a first for me, maybe it was right place right time or maybe it was something about her that put me at ease, she seemed to be a deep thinker. Why do I think that? she didn't really say anything particularly deep, it's just the way she carries herself? her mannerisms? maybe I'm seeing things in her that aren't there due to her looks? no, she was lovely.

He started to grow worried as he could tell that he would start to really like her if he got to know her so he resolved to himself to never let them get close, feeling Ner was enough for him, possibly even more than he deserved and that he shouldn't drag lovely Sarah into his miserable world, at least Ner is somewhat on my level. He really did care for Ner and even told himself that he loved her although he would never say this out loud, from an early point in their relationship he had become convinced that it would only be temporary and that Ner would never love him back, he felt that she wasn't capable of love at this point mostly due to his belief that she couldn't even love herself. While he believed love always grew over time, he thought it required a strong visceral starting point which Ner's interest in him lacked and as such it could never truly flourish into something soul bonding for a lifetime, that love needed this starting point to give it a sense of divine authority and that their relationship is something uniquely special. Since he had missed this chance to take hold of Ner's heart from the start he believed that no matter how much he became the right human for her that she would always see him as exactly that, just another human, not some divine and irreplaceable character in a possible shared story, simply another transaction.

When he had first started getting to know Ner, he really tried to be the right person for her, he turned his life around for her, partly because he was just looking for any excuse to do so but also because he felt like she deserved it. He liked Ner for many reasons but primarily because she reminded him of a younger version of himself, not in any tangible way but in terms of her psychology. While she hid it very well and managed to maintain a respectable outward appearance, he could tell she was deeply struggling with something and constantly running from confronting many topics. The mere fact that someone as intelligent and beautiful as her was with someone like him was enough evidence for him that she must have some serious issues that she wasn't dealing with. Her disparaging views of humanity and a lack of belief in the inherent good of most humans was something he had greatly struggled with at her age, it was only later in his life that he had managed to shake this heavy weight off his soul, partly from seeing a lot of good in the world but mostly just deluding himself into wanting to believe it. It became easier to delude himself as he aged and his problems became less existential and real problems started to accumulate causing the existential torment to take a back seat.

He struggled to break through into her soul though and became convinced that nothing he could do would help her, perhaps through time alone she would come to the same conclusions he had but he had given up hope, believing that even if she did, it would probably change her so much that she would no longer be interested in him. He had given up all hope of a shared future between them but he did still obsess over her, constantly tried to work out what she was thinking/feeling and try to make her feel as good as possible. He really enjoyed her company and thought she was a lovely intelligent conversationalist and felt very blessed for her letting him be one of the few who she let into her life. He felt she kept to herself out of spite of the world, thinking that she was angry at the world for taking her brother from her and believed the world didn't deserve her to spread her love throughout it. Ironically if she was a less lovely individual she might have been more willing to go on loving the world but her high sense of self worth told her that the world wasn't worthy of her.

He felt like she was like him in current ways too, not in identical ways but more in parallel ways. For example, he felt they were both incredibly intelligent but that their intelligence was in completely different forms. To Ast true intelligence was all related to patterns/connections and there were a lot of different skills related to this such as:

-Seeing patterns on your own

-Understanding patterns

-Remembering patterns

-Creating your own patterns

-Reproducing patterns

He thought she was much better at remembering patterns and reproducing them than him but he was better at seeing patterns and creating them, with them both being roughly equal at understanding them. He thought her type of intelligence was more traditionally masculine than his and conversely his was more feminine than hers. He loved her for this, he felt like they were perfectly complimentary, opposites almost of equal magnitude.

In other ways though he felt her inner mind was very feminine in terms of emotions and her primal desires. He put this down to her upbringing, her sick mother wasn't much of an influence on her life so she grew up surrounded by boys, her dad, her brother and his friends, she had learnt masculine skills from them and had instinctively suppressed her feminine inner self, perhaps even over compensating for it by becoming exceptionally masculine as if she was embarrassed for even having these thoughts within her. He felt that her suppressed inner female self was now so desperate to get out that it often overtook her mind even though she hid it effectively for the most part. He loved this as it was the opposite for him, he had grown up almost exclusively around females, his dad died at a young age and while his mother remarried, his step dad mostly stayed out of his way, leaving him to be raised by his mother, sister and two step sisters. He developed a relatively feminine personality and mannerisms but internally he felt very masculine with a strong desire to dominate and challenge himself for the sake of it. He loved how they were both opposite in this way but also complimentary as if they balanced each other out, she was more like what he should be if he was to be at peace with his inner self and he was more of what she needed to be. At times they would both deal with their emotions/desires that they suppressed unhealthily and as such it caused them to do some very horrible things when they inevitably no longer could be contained.

When he first met Ner, she had convinced him that she was masculine through and through and this impressed him further, how long she had managed to fool him and how good she was at hiding her inner self from the world. He thought they also had opposite facades that they put out to the world, thinking her 'façade' that she put out to the world was far more positive than the internal Ner and that his was far more negative than the internal Ast. She stayed positive and talked about all the good and acted happy even though she saw so much bad, he liked to talk about all the bad and acted like he was more unhappy than he was even though he saw so much good in the world, likely a remnant of his more depressive days. He had established his outward personality around things he believed in those times and he struggled to change his persona even after he started to see so much beauty all around him.

He envied her positive façade and it was something he was trying to achieve for himself so he respected her greatly for achieving it, he also didn't see her weakness of focusing on the negative too much as much of a slight against her character as it was relatable to him, he had been trapped in entirely negative/pessimistic thought patterns for most of his 20's, in fact it made him like her more as it made him feel some connection between their souls. He thought neither knew how to deal with life when their facades broke down, like at the times when she saw so much bad that she couldn't act happy anymore she didn't know how to act and just broke down and hid from the life. When Ast was actually unhappy, he didn't know how to properly express the hurt he felt and would usually undermine his own feelings with jokes and irony.

He liked how their strengths and weaknesses seemed to be opposite and equal and how she had really helped him understand his flaws albeit unintentionally, possibly just in a way any man can be inspired by the lure of a beautiful woman to improve, the driving force behind all history. He strived to help her work on her flaws but no matter what, he couldn't seem to manage saying anything critical which he thought might possibly be true without her getting offended at the mere suggestion that she might not be perfect.

While he usually seemed to steer the conversation between them, he felt like she was really doing all the heavy lifting of the conversation and that he could only maintain an interesting conversation with her because of the feedback/input she provided. He was more physically attracted to her than he had ever been to anyone else, he understood a lot about his own psychology as to what specifically attracted him to her but he tried to avoid thinking about it too deeply or communicating it to Ner, believing this is one of the parts of life that you should just accept and never discuss. As mentioned previously he absolutely loved her voice which seems a little odd considering he usually opted to text her rather than call her but this was due to not wanting to become too accustomed to it at fear of her voice losing the special place it held in his heart.

The main thing he liked about her though was that although they were both very bad people in their own ways, he believed that she, like him, truly strived to be good. However, in recent days he was starting to become disillusioned with this as he felt that she had started to resent him for becoming more productive.

He remembered how he felt at her age, he had just wanted to rebel against the world, rebel against what he was supposed to be and take revenge on the world for trying to force its will onto him. He thought this is how maturing generally works for all people like them, they love life a little too much when they are children and then bad things inevitably happen to them, they start to curse the world openly and rebel in juvenile ways, they grow up a little and think they have stopped hating the world just because they no longer rebel openly but they are just hiding it from themselves, they still resent the world and have just learned to hide it better, the resentment still manifests itself in themes of their life and now they are really only punishing themselves, they're not even spiting the world. Eventually they grow up enough to notice these repeating self destructive patterns and they learn how to let the internal hate truly go and to heal, they learn to express their love for themselves and the world and become the person they were meant to be.

He felt like he was on the verge of learning to love himself while she was still stuck at the point of hating the world internally but not outwardly. However, he felt like he was about to advance and it was seeming like this was creating too much distance between them. He loved how their opinions on topics seemed to fundamentally be the same but slightly different on minor details as if they could always learn a little from each other.

He thought about all this but he wasn't convincing himself, he felt like despite all this, he had grown to hate her but on some level he felt like the hate for her was really just a hate for his own failings, hating how he couldn't be right for her. He should have understood why she didn't want to see her flaws or improve as he was the same at her age but it was more of a hate that no matter what he did he couldn't alleviate deep suffering in the world, not even for one person. A hatred that no matter what he did, people like him would have to go through years of hell and he could never truly help anyone, people always have to help themselves or rather get themselves to a point where they want to be helped. This along with her increasing general indifference to him made him feel like an insufficient human being, he knew she really did like him in some strange way but it didn't feel real to him, he felt like she didn't see him as real at all. He knew she cheated and it annoyed him but he accepted it since he wasn't willing to be as sexual as anyone would require and it was just a norm in modern society, possibly this is why he didn't want to be more sexual, he was worried that if they did fuck more often and she still cheated on him then he would no longer have an excuse to tell himself surrounding why he isn't enough for her, thinking her cheating was at least somewhat justified given his actions. In recent days he couldn't help but feel like she was just too permanently broken as he finally started to actualise himself in the world. On an intellectual level he thought she may be justified for losing interest in him, she had been interested in the man he was, not the man he could be and was now becoming, never a good base for a long term relationship.

He thought about pursuing Sarah instead, he was now so convinced that Ner didn't love him and never would that he was struggling to self deceive himself about their compatibility anymore. She never really understood his humour and she could no longer handle any blunt honesty that he found himself unable to avoid saying. He also felt it would be fair since Ner refused to acknowledge themselves as a committed couple, she could have secured him for life if she wanted to which probably caused hidden resentment from the start. Ast couldn't shake the feeling that turning his back on Ner would be giving up on his past self to a degree just like everyone had done to him in his youth, in the early days of their relationship he had made a promise to himself to never give up on her but it was becoming increasingly hard, she was becoming increasingly distant and unwilling to make a single sacrifice to make their relationship work. She would not respond for days or forget something important and Ast would question what sort of psychology lead her to that place and he felt like she wouldn't make any real effort to explain herself, saying only that say she didn't know. Despite all his efforts, he still had little clue as to how her brain worked but I guess that's normal for men with regards to women. No clue whether she really didn't understand her own motives behind her actions, whether she was lying to him for bad reasons or if she was lying to him for good reasons, she refused to let him in and it drove him wild, he wasted days unsuccessfully trying to work out where her mind was at when she could have just told him a simple sentence to avoid all of it. He assumed she had to be confused about herself and must not know what she was doing, he refused to believe she could be that heartless but ultimately the end result was the same, on an emotional level he ended up feeling like she was indeed that heartless. He still loved her though and took a great amount of pride that a girl as intelligent, pretty and unique as her could show any sort of interest in a depraved nobody like himself.

Then there was Sarah, completely open and sure of herself, seemingly at peace and in love with the world. He was thinking he could really be happy with her and imagining their lives together when something crossed his mind, a regret that he didn't ask if she wrote poems too. It was now almost 10pm on a Friday, she was probably out having a life and if she wasn't it wouldn't be socially acceptable to text such a distant acquaintance at this time. He realised he was overthinking it, he should just be himself and not try to manipulate her or be a manufactured version of himself for her, believing that trying to be someone he wasn't and then slowly becoming what he really was is what created the main problems with Ner. He decided to text her, something simple, without much thought he wrote.

"Hey, I should have asked, do you write poems too?"

Her response took 2 minutes, just enough to not be instant "No, but I'd like to"

He thought about asking what she meant but preferred to just believe that she was like him in the sense that she tried to write poems a lot but failed. She interested him a lot which provided him with a new worry, the awareness that he would be driven to finish his poem to impress this girl, thinking that's not what a man with a girlfriend should be driven by even if his current girlfriend didn't love him, it wasn't right, he would plan to work out exactly why he would finish this poem and find enough of a reason to finish it regardless of the desire for her approval.

His brain was now tired of all these thoughts and emotions racing through his head and felt like he had solved the problem at hand, he wouldn't pursue Sarah, she was dangerous and would shake up his life too much right when he seemed to finally be getting it together, he would see Ner through to the end and let whatever happen, happen. He decided to chill out, he watered his plants then grabbed some alcohol and played a videogame before passing out in the early morning.