The Burden of Bitcoin

I would never amount to anything.

Years and years of my life spent developing this ‘pet project’ would all be in vain. Dad always reminded me. I could be married with kids and living a simple life in the suburbs. Mom always wanted that for me. It felt like the world around me didn’t understand what I was trying to create. Their lack of imagination for the future made them brush me off like a naive twat. They laughed at me from the sidelines, berated me in headlines, and desecrated the sanctity of my beliefs.

All I can see in front of me now is a computer screen, bright, flashing, and the number 40,000. I should feel happy, right? Ecstatic, beyond my wildest dreams. But here I am, unequivocally feeling nothing.

Empty.

I set out to do the very thing all the people I had looked up to told me abandon. I proved them wrong.

The screen flashes again.

41,000.

I looked up from my screen momentarily to the television on the wall whirring with images of people celebrating. My eyes started to wander around the room of my home office, looking at all of the things I had amassed over the past few years. A new leather designer sofa custom made in Italy. A massive marble coffee table speckled with gold inlay. Hundreds of articles written about me: some framed, some stacked, some strewn across the table, some waiting to be hung. This room makes up just one in the labyrinth of rooms on the estate. Just outside my door, I can hear the humming of the vacuum cleaner, gently growing and receding as the housekeeper makes his way past my wing. It’s become my favorite space. The intimacy I share with this room is unparalleled. I have ridden the wave of my successes and failures in the surroundings of these four walls. This room knows more about me than anyone I have ever let in, and ironically, it’s the one receiving me.

I unconsciously opened up this word document to jot down my thoughts like I’ve done for the last 15 years. Documenting my journey should have seemed more exciting than this, but today, today feels anticlimactic. Like I was waiting for something.

To feel something.

I thought this project would bring me some semblance of feeling again. I think my brother would have wanted that for me, had he lived. Had I turned around to save him and not just myself from that burning car. I had barely enough time to get myself out before the car was engulfed in flames.

That’s what I tell myself at least.

That’s why I can’t go back. That’s why I gave myself a new name. That’s why I hardly ever leave this room. This was the only way I could repent. I poured myself into this idea that he had started, to hope it would live and carry his memory eternally.

My brother was everything to me. He touched the lives of everyone he met. My parents favored him for sure. Growing up, nothing seemed unattainable to him. He dreamt big. He wished hard. He succeeded at everything. I followed him to college because I couldn’t give up being surrounded by his energy. He was my biggest confidant, and I’d like to believe I was to him. That’s where bitcoin was incubated, in the rickety bunk bed of a college dorm that we shared. He didn’t tell me about it at first, but when he did, the light in his eyes told me everything. For one moment, I saw the world that he saw his eyes through, and I wanted to hold on to that feeling just a bit longer. If that was ecstasy, I was hooked.

That day, I walked to the nearest bank, badly wounded from the accident wearing clothing tattered and singed. With a check of $20,000 from our joint account, and his little black notebook worn at the seams held tightly to my chest, I never turned back, until now.