Self portrait of a man légèrement dépassé

@Elva Mohammad

By anonymous

Is it possible to feel out-of-date when you’re only 24 years old?

It’s an odd sensation to put into words, the perception that what is important to others will forever be beyond my fingertips. Tantalisingly so.

As if I get my news from history books.

I feel like I am chasing a spectre in the woods, but whenever I close the distance, I catch only frosted mist and the breathy residue of relevance.

Maybe age plays no role?

I never really acclimatised to normal social interactions at school. After years of being shoved and kicked to the bottom of hierarchies by my peers, I learned to spurn and eventually ignore them.

Hierarchies, that is.

I had something of a knack for talking to strangers. I think it came from my parents who always spoke to me as if I was an adult. At university I became a figure who broke bread at any table.

Because who cares who the cool kids are?

But my university was an abyss of misfits; people like me and worse. To be liked by them was to be subterranean. A King of Beggars.

But a king has a kingdom, and surely the ruler of one kingdom is happier than a vassal in the next?

After graduating, I moved to Paris for a job, cheating an interview with my knack for talking to strangers. But I didn’t know how to fit in. Even in English, my words were stilted and stumbled out woozily. My colleagues spoke in honeyed gossip and enlightened confidence. I could smile, joke and cheer but I couldn’t break into that cloistered world.

I was benighted and clumsy.

I was different.

They belonged to that rarefied breed of bohemian who shunned capitalism so long as their family wealth supported their financial and libertine recklessness. They were activists indifferent to the world. Artificial warriors. Craven and geocentric. They lived in a world of self-bestowed adoration.

And they were sexist. I think. Bullies of boys who didn’t quite fit in. They were fun and pretty and charmless and clawed.

Sirens.

Wolves in cashmere.

I couldn’t breathe.

Something about me wasn’t right.

***

Years have passed and hindsight is a lantern. My colleagues were beggars of a sort. They were subjects of another kingdom, whose rulers looked through them just as much as they looked through me. They had to contend with Parisian stardom and Hollywood elites.

How could they not be status-obsessed and set to rip and tear apart the weaknesses of others?

But a fact of social cannibalism is that where no fleshy weaknesses are present, the cannibal must ravenously set upon himself. A ritual of ouroboric vanity.

Surely the ruler of one kingdom is happier than a vassal in the next?

So, I lag as if several seconds behind my time zone. I feel languorous and idle. I struggle to read the job market and tick boxes in interviews. Maybe because I struggle to read a room full of sequined elites with designer bed hair.

But there are others like me. And we rule our own kingdom. Together.