"He was wrong, dad. From great responsibility, comes great power"

I always liked Spiderman. He has always been my hero because it was like he understood everything I was going to go through growing up. To face grades, girls and the typical problems of teenage life, he was the most human of superheroes which is why there are many who see him as one of the best. The dream of a geek having superpowers and saving the world seems like such a magical fantasy for one such as me and from that, I have learned to embrace the challenges ahead but I guess like Spidey, it wasn't all costume and theatrics, he was also Peter Parker behind the mask.

I read Earth X after a while and it changed the way I looked at my costumed hero. Twenty years later, Peter became a shadow of his former self as the burden of his responsibilities finally shattered him. When everyone had powers of their own, there was no responsibility left for Spidey since everyone had their own powers thus their own responsibilities. Finally, Peter was able to live the life always denied of him and there I perhaps knew more than ever, who was Spiderman.

I have learned that Parker hated being Spiderman. Given a choice, he would never have chosen to become the webslinger. Given a chance, he would've settled happily with the woman he loved. But like everything else, life wasn't perfect. Maybe the fact that he was more human than hero, made his pain even more real.

One of his best villains was the Green Goblin. A lot of people usually think that GG was just a psycho on a bat glider. More then that, he was the father of Parker's best friend who he later on had to dispose of to save his "love" Mary Jane. Parker never loved MJ... Parker had always loved Gwen Stacy, who fell victim to GG. Mary Jane and his best friend, Harry, were the ones to be. When Gwen was taken away, Parker hated to face life alone and soon fell for MJ but that's the thing I discovered about my hero, he hated being alone, he needed someone to be there. If you think about it, MJ was the rebound girl but who would blame him, he's only human.

Parker had a lot of sins in his time as Spiderman. He killed his best friend's father and stole his woman, think about it. Ultimately, these two best friends faced their issues, ironically, in the guise of masks: Parker as Spiderman and Osborn as the Green Goblin II. Whenever I think about it, I marvel at the drama it took to lead to this climatic end yet I cheered for Spidey to beat the Goblin as I was a child who only understood that the good guys always win. Who was the good guy then? Spidey? It hardly seems like it but it still a matter of the greater evil, Spiderman would win. The lesser sinner gets the lesser punishment.

I saw the real Spiderman then. He was just a man, no more than any other person. He was not a hero, it was imposed on him. The great power comes great responsibility belief of his gave him the morale to don the mask but really... he didn't live a life meant for him. He cursed himself whenever he puts on the mask. He can never be himself, he could never face the thing he was doing over and over again. He hated to risk his life and others in what he does. He was never meant to be a hero. All those years of believing in him seemed to come crashing down on me as I finally knew but later on, I came to see what it felt like to be... like him.

I knew now how it felt to live with the regrets and sins of the past. I seem to face everyday with constant reminders of the things I have done. Sometimes, it's too much to bear. It feels like your chest is being stabbed over and over again, gashing and ripping your soul deeper and deeper. To top it all of, you seem so alone in the world. Nothing goes right and you feel like you're falling and it doesnt seem to stop. You want the fall to end, to break your bones, to shatter your innards - to kill you - but you just pick up speed, never seeming to crash. You meet a person who you think can make everything better but deep down, it's a lie. You feel desperate and you frantically whore yourself to anyone with enough pity to give you a chance. It all hurts. It all fucking hurts.

You put on a mask to make it easier to live with yourself. You put on a smile to keep people away. You put a stupid status in YM to attract attention no one ever notices anyway because everyone has their own lives to worry about. You write in your blog because you cannot seem to control your fingers or your heart to broadcast your pain for everyone to see. And later on, you see people asking "are you okay?" and "do you want to talk?" and you think about whether to tell them the truth or say something like, "I'm doing fine. I just had a burst of rage to exhaust" and choose the latter because it seemed easier to face problems yourself. But that's a lie. You do it to make yourself feel better by having people seem like they care. That's the truth. The people who seemed to make everything better is lost and all you have are people who try.

I always thought that I lived the life Spidey had on paper and maybe that's exactly the case... so he will always be my hero no matter what because later on, in that 20 years in the future comic, he had learned to face his sins and regrets. Maybe I can too, maybe I won't but I want to get there maybe. He just lived his life and took the lemons to turn into lemonade. Though it hits me, at everytime I close the book, that he was fiction and I was real and happy endings even an ending such as his, is not always possible in the real world.