My math teacher, who I personally admire for her personality, would often interrupt her own lessons, not because she wanted to, but because of others' distraction, and treat us to short stories or old Sicilian sayings. One in particular stuck with me, and she'd usually throw it out there like this:
"… classic case of: if you're born round, you can't die square."
If you take it lightly, it sounds like just another dumb saying. But lately, I've been thinking about it a lot. People always say it's possible to change during life, to go from one extreme to the other. But is it really? My name is Kawtar Ali, but they call me Shu. I was born on December 24, 2007. My life, in my opinion, can be summed up and understood through that single date: Christmas Eve, a day that gets close to perfection, brushes up against it, reaches for it… but never quite gets there. I think I'm a fairly capable person in life, but I lack any kind of passion in what I do. It's always been like that. Having talent but not being able to enjoy what you're doing is a curse thrown on those people who would've been too perfect to exist otherwise, almost like they were gods themselves. And out of all those people, I'm the most perfect. Why? Because I'm the one who's the most aware of this whole condition.
That alone makes me both perfect and imperfect at the same time. One step from perfection, always reaching for it, but never quite there. I was born like this, and I'll die like this, as they say: if you're born round, you can't die square. I emphasize "can't" because there are loads of people who try to change the condition they were born into, but they fail, just like Mastro Don Gesualdo, character written by Verga, who, in my opinion, is the most "perfect" writer we studied in high school. Just like that character, many people today want to change the social class they come from. Some delude themselves thinking they'll make it; others do it just for plain old money. The first kind, I call "imperfect." The second kind, they're the ones who get close to perfection, brush up against it, but never grab it. Right now, I'm just a seventeen-year-old who's about to face the dreaded "State exam." But I've got a story. A past. A future. And, most of all, a present. Regular people would probably call my past "unlucky," but those of us who strive for perfection know it's exactly that past that makes me the most imperfect, yet also the most perfect, among the imperfect, but that's a story for another day. My present? I'm a girl dying to escape from a house where I can't fully be myself. A girl who's about to run off to a big city for university, far from the cops I'm sadly forced to call "parents." As for my future, I don't know it yet to tell you about it, but I can tell you what I want it to be. Like the imperfect ones, like Don Gesualdo, I want to change my social class. I want to get rich, marry a disgustingly rich guy and have kids who grow up spoiled enough to be used to luxury, but not rotten from it. What I'm missing is courage, and more than that, the will to actually do it, and that side of me makes me the most imperfect of the imperfect… and still, the most perfect of the perfect. Egocentrism, as you've probably picked up from this piece, is a defining trait, not just of me, but of everyone like me. Let's be clear though. When I say "egocentrism," I'm not talking about those snobs who grew up with money as their only friend. Ours is different. Our egocentrism revolves, ironically, not around ourselves, but around how we see the world around us. It's not about being the center of the world, but about rebuilding it using our own rules, our own systems, our own way of seeing things. Every imperfect person has their own way of viewing the world, and that is what makes them perfect, more like a god than a human. By forcing our worldview onto the world around us, we own it. That's what makes us perfect. But again, we're still imperfect. If everyone blindly followed the rules of us imperfect people, then we could really be called perfect. We'd be gods of this world. But too bad for us, we were born in a world that already has its gods: a possibly-nonexistent deity, and Science, the most perfect god of all in this world. So let's think for a second, how did those gods get to power? Whether what their followers say is true or not, I don't care, what matters is that they laid out their rules, their worldview, and a massive chunk of people bought into it. Science with its cold logic. Religion, on the opposite end, with its moral compass. Even though the two are totally opposed, most people can't commit fully to either. They believe in God, but don't have faith, or they believe in science, but still believe in coincidences. That is the ultimate sign of how flawed this world is, and that's what defines most people born in the 2000s. We, on the other hand, we, the perfectly imperfect, believe only in ourselves, in what we see, in the conclusions we reach, in nothing and no one else. That is why "normal" people think we're egocentric.
Lately, there's a new website making the rounds. A replacement for old-school Omegle. It's called "Uhmegle." Just like the old one, you chat with complete strangers. On those soul-killing boring days, I always end up there, chatting with whoever piques my interest.
One day, I ended up talking to what most of you would call a "pussy-chasing loser", the kind I usually avoid, but I had no clue what those types could bring to a conversation, so I gave it a shot. As soon as he started asking uncomfortable questions, I dodged them by telling him about some old flame. We talked for a few minutes. He listened, occasionally replied to what I was saying. I told him the kind of man I want, someone like me, someone who sees the world like I do, someone who applies the same rules. Probably sick of my rant, he hit me with this:
"Yeah, it's true. You only care about yourself. You didn't even ask me one question."
Reading that, I got chills. It crawled up my spine, reached my brain, and something clicked. For a moment, I forgot that normal people aren't born with the ability to understand my kind of perfection.
And this is where we're stuck, we, the imperfectly perfect. If we'd been born in another universe, in another time, maybe then we could've finally reached the perfection we crave.
Maybe then, we'd be the Gods of Imperfection.