Failure

This is not a story. At least, not in the typical sense. In a way it is a story, in the way that you would acknowledge a happening you heard from a co-worker as a story. There doesn’t seem to be any plot, nor any climax or direction. And the only purpose evident is to try to make someone understand, besides for him. You see, many people go through life not understanding much of anything at all, and yet that seems to be a perfectly fine way of living nowadays. More people are obtaining more education, yet less seem to understand any of it. Perhaps this is not so. However, it would be hard to say otherwise.
Some may say it is not a good habit to dwell on the past, while others say we must learn from our mistakes in order to prevent future disasters. Both have proven to fail when put against human nature. The past, in life, is the only thing concrete and undeniable. What has happened has happened, and nothing will change that, and to not think of the past is impossible, and to learn from it is even harder. Some learn, which is why we are where we are, which supposedly is a good thing. But no matter how much we learn, there are still aspects to life which evade our understanding, regardless if you are an understanding person or not. It is these aspects that he thinks about the most.
He is a keeper, a thinker, but you can call him what you will. His name is not important, nor is it important what he is. What is important, however, is what he does, or in many cases what he fails to do. Life has a funny way of making some failures more important than most successes. Success, once achieved, can be repeated again and again, but failure is a chaotic and haphazard element to life, and is rarely duplicated. It is in these failures that he thrives, so much so that one can say he does not allow himself to succeed in anything, for fear that upon success, he will lose what makes him, him.
Now, as for what he does, it is not easily explained. As said before, he is a keeper; of incidents, of personalities, of all the little details that truly make a person who they are. Nobody is perfect, and it is in these flaws that he finds beauty and perfection. It is in these flaws that he seeks out what he feels is missing from his life. He is lost in every applicable meaning of the word. Blindly searching through the souls of those around him, he looks for that thing that will make him stop thinking, and start existing.
He is a thinker as well, and he does this quite well. Too well, in some opinions, but that is all a matter of perspective. Very little can happened that he has not already thought of happening, and very little brings the excitement of surprise to his spiraling mind. Of people he thinks most, and when he has found someone interesting enough, he observes and thinks, making a detailed report of who that person is. From the abandoned lover to the floating soul, he has seen all the personalities a person wishes to see in his lifetime. He has embraced them all, from the beautiful to the repulsive, and has torn them apart, piece by piece, to see how they are who they are.
He has done this for everyone he has met, including himself, and has yet to find what it is he is missing. Perhaps it is because he cannot fully analyze himself. Perhaps his file is sitting on a shelf, covered in dust, half finished and waiting for someone who can analyze and understand people the way he does to come along and finish his own report. Perhaps this person will find what he is missing, and be able to set him on his path. Or perhaps, even more likely, he is not missing anything at all. It could be, through all the dissecting of everything around him, he has lost the meaning of what it means to truly live. Being so focused on what’s around him, it could be he has forgotten who he is, and it is this revelation that will set him free. But, for now, he will have to wait. He is busy with his failures, and just like this story, he has no plot to follow, no climax to rush the emotions, and no direction through life. And his only purpose evident is to try to make someone know what it’s like to truly understand.