Paul the comic book store owner

 I spent my early childhood feeling alone. I felt like I had parents and a brother that never understood me. I had a couple friends and I spent a lot of my early childhood on the internet. I would watch superhero cartoons and things of that sort and I would look over at my parents or my brother to see a confused look on their faces. They never judged me for liking these things but they could never understand why I liked them. I remember I was on vacation with my family and my cousin who's a couple years older than me but I've always been very close with her. I was in a room that she, my brother and I shared. I was watching a Pewdiepie playthrough of Last of Us, and my cousin and my brother walked into the room and I embarrassedly closed the laptop with extreme haste so that they wouldn't see what I was watching. They thought I was watching porn. I felt like they wouldn't understand it and therefore wouldn't understand me, so I never gave them the opportunity to not understand me. That was my entire early childhood and early adolescence: "don't give anyone the opportunity to not understand and to then judge me". 

Around the 8th or 9th grade, I started going to my local comic book store. I was lonely and bored and so I would go there a couple times a week after school for a few hours. The person who ran it was this guy Paul. Paul was in his mid-30s at the time, married, two dogs who were at the shop every day, mutton chops. I would come in and just talk about the comics I liked and he would recommend me ones based off of that. Then I started becoming a douchebag film-bro, and he would talk to me about Tarantino and Scorcese. I never had to explain myself to Paul; there was nothing foreign about me to him. After I accepted that dynamic of feeling understood, that's when his role in my life reached its most important. He took on the role of a mentor akin to an older brother which I never really experienced with my own. He took this angry, resentful, guarded kid and guided him away from a place of eternal condemnation to being a hateful cretin on the internet, alone forever. Paul showed me an alternative to the hate I was feeling. He showed me compassion and understanding that I had never felt before. I didn't know or understand at the time, but Paul saved my life. 

When I was around 16 I stopped going to the comic book store. I had made more friends, started drinking, partying, thinking about girls; the comic book store, Paul included just faded from my consciousness. It took a couple years for me to understand how impactful Paul was to me. The comic book store is closed now. I never got to thank him. The comic book store is closed now.