The Pretender

Nobody seemed to see how sad the Pretender was.  He presumed that nobody really cared…though part of him remained hopefully enough…arrogant enough…to presume that it really wasn’t completely so.

The Pretender, resplendent in blue and black, thought of himself as a hero…a super-hero, in fact….and sometimes…just sometimes…he was just that.

And sometimes…too often for comfort…he was not.  Sometimes he was a charlatan…a deluded charlatan in a silly costume.  And he knew it…though he didn’t always consciously acknowledge that fact.

It was often hard to know when the one…the self-sacrificing hero…left off and the other…the sad, vainglorious charlatan…began.  Most times the Pretender, living a life that wasn’t half as real as he liked to believe it was, didn’t want to know.

The Pretender, wearing a mask that seemingly worked better than he really wanted it to, stayed invisible in plain sight…swooping down to save the day and then disappearing into the shadows lingering long enough to try to hear some of the impassioned cheers he thought his heroism was supposed to give birth to. 

Nobody seemed to know how sad…how lonely and how angry and how defeated…the Pretender was.  But that was okay, most days the Pretender didn’t really know either.  He got up each day, put on his mask and his cape, and, disguised in blue and black, pretended to be part of the world. 

He was who he was.  A hero…even if only in his own mind; a charlatan…even if he only occasionally accepted that fact; he was, in his costume and his too-effective mask, the Pretender.