I Used To Be Someone
One day you're the hero. You save people from creatures they fear, you save the world from an evil it could never understand. You're part of a team, you're surrounded by people who would lay down their lives to protect yours. You pretend to other people that you're nothing special, just a normal teenager trying to make his way through school. There will be times when you make a choice, to fight and save the day, or to keep on pretending to your other friends that you're just one of them. Morality dictates that you chose to fight.
Suddenly, you don't have to chose. That the greatest decision you face every day is what clothes to wear, or which class to study for. You were injured whilst preparing to make money for charity, and you're not in the great shape you once were. When that happens, you'll find you're no longer part of a team, that suddenly your friends will neither lay down their lives for you, or even visit you, they'll replace you, and carry on. You've gone from doing extraordinary things, fighting on alien spaceships, travelling across worlds, being in charge of machines capable of destroying cities to being the person you really were pretending to be inbetween saving the world. You feel alone.
When you're a ranger, you lose contact with those who don't know about your other life. You will try stay with the people who know, so that you don't have to pretend anything. When you're constantly disappearing, it's easier. But when you're forced to leave that life behind, who do you have? You'd rejected everyone else by necessity of being who you were. Your list of friends has decreased.
This forces you to ask yourself, was it worth it? All of the lying to people, the late hours, the things that stopped you being a teenager. When you're with your friends, battling the most evil creatures the universe has ever known, you feel on top of the world, as if you're untouchable. When you see how quickly you can be replaced, it begs the question, were you special? If someone can take your place so quickly, and not crack under the pressure, were you any better? You've been left with little confidence, little friends, little meaning to go on after the things you've seen, things nobody else could know. And the people you knew to trust with everything you had, are no longer around.
But they visited you, not long after they left you behind, but long enough to have stories to tell. Hearing about new villains, new equipment and new chapters in their lives, it reminds you how yours has changed, and how nothing will be the same as before, no matter how hard you try.
Rocky Desantos.