u/Noah215a

I'm cursing you all with the burden of Knowledge.

People love to act like having knowledge beyond mortal understanding is a blatant, horrible human tragedy. The thing is, knowledge itself isn't the curse. The curse is finding out a truth so overwhelmingly and grotesquely catastrophic, your brain needs to spend the rest of its existence marinating in it like a God damn rotisserie chicken from hell.

The exact date and time you are going to die is horrific.

The meaning of life could be worse.

The idea that every guy who jokes "HA, GUESS IT'S FREE THEN" when a minimum wage worker scans an item and it fails to read should be legally launched into the upper atmosphere is also not exactly something we need to know.

But amongst all these terrifying pieces of information, there is one fact that I believe was truly not meant for humanity to ever uncover.

There exists at this very moment a fully-grown, tax-paying, twenty-year-old man who has had an off-and-on childhood crush on Sonic the Hedgehog for almost a decade.

And unfortunately, I am him.

No, I am not a myth; I exist as one of you while carrying the weight of this secret like radioactive uranium within my chest.

Ever since I can remember, I've been fascinated by Sonic games, and right around my ten to eleven year old age-when my brain was buffering its first truly gay thoughts like a 2008 YouTube video-I realized with the earth-shattering finality of the second law of thermodynamics that I was romantically attracted to the blue blur.

I did not do it ironically either. I have never done this ironically, which I suppose makes it all that much worse. There was no 'bit', no 'joke', no 'haha wouldn't it be funny if'. My young, pre pubescent mind simply encountered the character and declared, "Yeah, him. That one. This is the guy."

It eventually passed, like the other childish embarrassments we outgrow and forget until they spring out from the dark to haunt our deepest thoughts at the least opportune moments. It had, it seemed, vanished forever, like the curse I finally believed I had escaped.

And then... Sonic Frontiers happened.

And Roger Craig Smith-who, on Sonic Frontiers, has the vocal equivalent of a crisp hundred-dollar bill and sounds like he'd offer financially sound, emotionally responsible advice during thunderstorms-showed up with his deep, dulcet tones.

And like a secret sleeper agent I never knew I had planted within myself over a decade prior, it activated.

All ten years of intense psychological progression were destroyed, dissolved into nothing.

And now I am left to continue life. It's my burden to bear. While other men have become doctors, engineers, astronauts, and the like-all the normal, adult careers-I am left to combat demons that arise from the simple fact that I am a man, a grown man, who still has an attraction to a fictional, blue rodant-furry.

It is my damn fucking chud life.

And now, I guess it's yours too.