Stand Again
Clawing his way up with his fingernails, he forced himself to stand again. It was always this way. Getting up after every fall was the hardest thing he'd ever done, but he went on with it out of sheer stubbornness.
For him, it was always an uphill battle. He'd always had to fight for things, which was hard when one was the child who was always picked on and roughed up and pushed around. Sometimes, he wanted so badly to give up, but he never did.
Things that were just dropped into the hands of others, he had to work for. He wasn't a naturally charming person; he wasn't gifted in anything, except for mathematics. Where the others would look up the latitude and longitude from the books, he could work the logarithms out in his head. In a world of cheats and shortcuts developed for people less gifted, that wasn't much use to him.
Mathematics was easy. Human interaction was not.
The first few days of shipboard life after being ashore for a while were torture, until he regained his sea legs and relearned the ability to walk and stand on board a ship. He seemed to spend so much time recovering and reacting that the moments when he could step in before a crisis were a blessed balm, a moment of haven and relief. He had learned to not rely on those moments, though.
Perhaps he could read people a little bit better than most, but that didn't mean he could actually understand them. He might be able to predict their moves, but he could not comprehend their motivations. While he did understand chance as a pure concept, there were just too many variables in the equation for him to reliably guess what was even going on in their lives. They were closed books to him, locked away like the keys to their hearts, sealed with the seven seals, just as he was to them. He'd always been that way; he'd always known it. On some deep, fundamental level, he was different. Maybe it was something broken, maybe it wasn't. Whatever it was, it had always made it nearly impossible to make friends. People were so hard to understand. It wasn't like mathematics, where two and two always made four, and the cosine could always be relied on to determine the correct angle.
Maybe he wasn't naturally charming, or good at making friends, or even particularly good-looking. But at least he could try. At least, he could learn.
At least, he could keep on getting back up again.