EPTMy girlfriend had just moved out, and suddenly my drinking became a bit less fun and a lot more depressing. Having replaced fucking all night by playing video games and eating, I had also become terribly fat. At work I had started eating M&Ms instead of my usual snack, grapes, or nature’s M&Ms.
All I could think of during the day was getting home and playing computer games.
By gaining weight, I had lost a lot of my confidence. What was once a solid fortress of feeling superior, began crumbling. Fast.
I needed a plan. The other clerks talked about applying for jobs once our training was finished.
The thought horrified me. My marks had been great, for attendance at school was mandatory and the lessons were a joke, but the letter of recommendation I would get from the office would kill any chance of employment I had.
Besides, I didn’t want to work a desk job any more. I didn’t want to deepen my knowledge of accounting and economics, I didn’t want to suck up to clients, I didn’t want my job chances to depend on how much my bosses liked me.
I wanted out.
But first I had to endure another 10 months of regularly attending work.
I started going to the doctor regularly, saying I had head-aches after my meningitis and
I honestly don’t know any more, if I had them as regularly as I got a doctor’s notes.
At any rate, I was sick a lot. These sick days I would spend, naturally, getting fatter and fatter while slaying dragons and orks.
My social life was non-existent. As much as I had loved my girlfriend, our nights in had meant very little social contact otherwise, so I barely had any friends. I remember getting together with a girl from my voc-school, soon after my break-up. I had been drinking furiously, had already gone fat, was depressed and for the first (and last) time in my life, I didn’t get it up.
There I was, fat, lonely, nearly un-employable, target to much mockery at work, and terribly, terribly sober. The only colleagues I liked had quit already. There were three apprentices left, a meek, dumb girl who was bullied so much she didn’t talk at all anymore, and the boss’s niece, who thrived in the environment. Sarah had tried to kill herself a couple of months earlier and was hospitalised since.
At breaks I regularly drove to the nearest town to get lunch.
Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December, and it was raining heavily.
I was wearing a long coat, smoking, and passing a book shop.
For whatever reason, in the display window next to all the recent best-sellers, between self-help books and astrology guides, there lay a book that caught my eye. I found it strange that an English book was in the display case and that it looked distinctly beaten up, and I just went in.
I asked the shopkeeper, a really cute girl, about it. She had apparently forgotten it there, reading it herself. She said she’d read it about ten times already, and offered to lend it to me.
I was sure I couldn’t understand a word of it, but I didn’t want her to know that, so I accepted.
The details don’t matter much, but for the first time since fifth grade, I had picked up a book voluntarily. I took the rest of the day to read it, not returning to work. I read, and then I read it again.
I had to look up half of the words, and barely understood the plot, but I returned it after a week, knowing its humour and uplifting style of writing had changed my life.
I knew then, I had to go back to school. I knew that however hard it would be, I would find a way to leave behind the place I hated the most. Reading became fun again. I ditched my computer, and I read, and read, and read.
My frequent visits to the book store made me get to know the storekeeper a little better.
I related to her most of my story and how her displacing her book made such a difference.
We even went out for coffee a couple of times when our breaks aligned, which felt great.
She moved away, eventually, and when I came to the store for the first time after she had moved, she had left a present for me with a co-worker. This will read like a cliché, but obviously it was the book she had first borrowed me. On the first page of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, she had written: “Good luck at school and keep reading!”
One night, I met one of the last friends remaining to me. He was even fatter than I was, and we ordered a family sized pizza each of us would have had no problem eating alone at all. We drank heavily, and at some point, I proposed:
“Let’s celebrate the end of our fatness.”
He was into the idea, and we pulled through. I started eating healthy, he stopped eating altogether.
We both lost huge amounts of weight and next to reading, I started cycling. He quickly looked like a particularly malnourished stick-insect, and I did my best to keep up. I lost close to 60, he lost well above 90 pounds.
I had a plan, I was approaching a normal weight, I even had hobbies.
And my cock worked again.
My confidence was back, and I took a gamble.
With 4 months left at work, I stopped showering for a week.
I smelled like I had just won a fisting-contest and my clothes looked like they were used to mop the floor at said contest. They moved my desk to the basement.
My gamble had won me eight hours of paid reading time a day.
The day before my final examination, I was sitting at the Rhine.
It was a hot summer’s night, and I wanted to hang out with a friend from school and study.
He brought beers, and so instead of learning, we sat at a fire, drank, and threw our books and notes into the river, page after page, one by one.
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Part 1: Enticement
Part 2: Sarah
Part 3: Attitude
Part 4: Finale
