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He was jealous of people with tough upbringings because he felt they built strong character. His own character felt prosaic, complacent, and very conventionally male. Not that he disliked himself—not in absolute terms anyway. He was merely constantly aware that many millions shared roughly similar bundles of traits and that he could never light up the rooms he wanted to light up most. Nobody would describe him as a free spirit. He wished he could think more beautiful thoughts.

His expensive schooling had given him many opportunities to become someone quite different and it was difficult to pin down why he hadn’t. He had been a competent actor and singer in school musicals. He had preferred learning Thai to French. It felt like at each major milestone of the development of his sense of agency or ability to exercise it, he had made choices that should have marked the start of some more exotic character arc, blossomed into true and lifelong passions—and yet these arcs had never been drawn, or had been pencilled in and then erased. His soul regressed to the grammar school mean. Entropy always won.

He could talk to people about all this at parties, provided he got drunk enough. This often took the form of asking others if he could ask them a question and when they said sure, dumping on them his entire life story—the monologue so uncomfortably long tonight and him so uncomfortably wasted that no-one interjects even as he pauses to scull his ginger beer and spill half down his shirt. He’d started with a question in mind but now forgets it quite completely, limping across the finish line with a “so what would you do if you were me?” that dirties everything, makes his companions feel used and reluctantly responsible for the sorry thing before them. He wears a thin cream collared shirt with palm trees on it and a black bowtie—the kind of party getup one wears to convince themselves they are laidback—with the dark beer splotch over his sternum so central and wide, still growing hypnotically with each heave of his between-buttons visibly-carpeted chest, that all four others cannot peel their gaze off it even as they speak. They give delicate advice to him, commiserate with him and focus studiously on finding common ground. He is not so drunk he cannot sense this. He knows they are not being themselves around him anymore, knows why, too, and to the great relief of all recuses himself to take a piss.

There had been a time when he did these conversations better. He could namedrop painters and the basics of their style, segue into discussions of beauty that worked for awhile to convince others of his soulfulness... got them to stop judging a book by its cover, let the real him shine through. But he had not been proactive about learning more of art, or reading, or otherwise expanding his cultural spheres. By the time he left college, others without his schooling—which had been far more responsible for this knowledge base than his ego would ever concede—had caught up and were beginning to surpass him. These days someone would mention a new book or exhibitions or hot author in contention for the Pulitzer and one or two others would know them and those soulful few would spring into passionate conversations that he could neither contribute to nor interrupt. Not being involved hurt some; not even being looked at hurt the most. My silence doesn’t mean I don’t have something to say!, he would think resentfully, knowing that it did.

Not to say that he did not enjoy those conversations; he truly liked art, for one, and a small flame of hope would always flicker in his gut—hope that this conversation marked his entry into a wider bohemian social circle that would deliver culture unto him at scale and allow him to share in its identity. That his very presence in the conversation was a brand-lit beacon of their trust. But he was quite conscious of his inability to contribute and of how his mind was already filing away these culture-facts for future conversations and of the search algorithm running in the back of his mind that desperately sought to relate these new findings back to a topic or work more familiar to him. He found himself trying to impress people whom he was embarrassed to feel inferior and junior before. He finds himself, mid-twenties now, rolling out the same few quirky observations to nineteen year-old girls that he first thought when he was nineteen too. He is disgusted by the timeless efficacy of his manufactured witticisms, by the tightness in his slacks as the girls ply him with validation… he doesn’t even fuck them, though he could, ashamed to hell he hasn’t grown and convinced that these girls—bright young girls—would see right through him in the morning light. He stares at their breasts with increasingly daring lingers that they must have caught onto and yet do not seem to mind. He wants to tell them they should mind it very much. He is a sick man, not a bad man but an ill one, a Judas to his own artistic aspirations. He could only let them down.

Things feel more even when he dates women his own age. He especially likes consultants, lawyers... type-A brunettes he finds on apps that are definitely using him, too. He is certain he hates lip fillers and fake tits until he fucks a woman with bad examples of both and finally understands that it is precisely their unnaturalness that gets him off—the shameless transparency of her desire, her determination to exploit his hardwired impulse. He finds something highly erotic about the realisation that his cock responds even to visual signals that his mind confidently proclaims to be surgical trickery, and that these women know him so intimately that they will bet twenty grand and a sagging future on this insight. Not even to babytrap him, either—at least not always. Some women really do just want to fuck; something his father had never told him and that his mother had done her best to portray as wildly uncommon, even knowing its frequency herself, out of fear that her son would one day break some girl’s heart who truly did want more and would have been the one. Well, mom, sorry, he thinks as he slaps this girl who loves it, and he pushes this thought out of his head with all his might. As a kind of experiment after sex, he shares with her the Van Gogh fact he’s been trotting out all these years: how most people think he cut his ear off for a prostitute, but really it was over an argument with a friend and he merely gave it to the prostitute, and how his art is best interpreted not through a romantic lens but a mental health one, and what does she think about all this. Well, she finds it hot and growls a little—famished lioness before a deer—and pulls him back inside her without a condom. He should find this hot too but knows that really she was determined to be turned on, to extract all value possible from the night before her self-imposed cutoff at eleven and that all the Van Gogh fact did was tick some inner checkbox proving that she’s not a slut if she goes for more—he’s seducing her, is he not?, playing the passionate art history buff she’ll fuck on Tuesdays. It’s validation; he’ll take it. It's not the kind he needs.

He knows there is a version of his tale that ends in money and midlife crisis. One where he leans into what he’s best at, the revealed preferences of his mind, and holds what’s left of his soul underwater long enough that it drowns—not before a struggle, probably not before he tries to save a stripper or two, but it would drown eventually. Then there’s another path where he sacrifices something else to reclaim what he’s lost: perhaps give up his body for the gin bars, biceps for baroque... but he’s too attached to all he has, hasn't the nerve to just let go. A passive path, of course, his paralysis becoming permanent and his soul increasingly sclerotic till he is bequeathed the worst of all worlds—wandering the pale between the material and aesthetic, the Cultured and the Hedonists, fitting in with neither. A path where he relearns Thai; takes on community theatre; spends his days retreading territory he used to know, ever conscious of the excellence he could have achieved had he never left yet mournful of the lands he now knows he’ll never see. You can have anything you want in life, soothes a friend, but you can’t have everything—the friend nevertheless appearing to indeed have everything they want in life, having simply chosen to want less. You might have had that choice, he wants to say, but I don’t. His soul wants what it wants. His soul *is* a big soul, after all, the soul of a Van Gogh or a Caravaggio—a soul that could have been something, gone somewhere but for its unfortunate pairing with a mind that found safer paths and a temperament that chose them.

He was jealous of people with tough upbringings. He felt like he deserved one. He felt like he was worthy of worse temptations, brighter highlights—not success, neither fame, just a story more worth telling. He wanted to be in the room with the people who loved; who really loved, who really felt, because he had once felt with them—he still recalled what it felt like to really feel, even as his capacity dwindled year by year. A man can survive only so many staredowns in the bathroom mirror. Only so many confrontations with that face no longer his own and growing pallid around those blue eyes still nineteen… but where had that boy gone? Would he have been proud of the man he’d become, congratulated him on all he’d achieved without losing his soul entirely? Or would the boy have found his efforts insufficient, tokenistic, heart not really in them… been among that literary crowd sighing relief as he got up to piss, “thank fuck he’s off” implicit in the hearty background laughs..?

Did he deserve the boy he had once been? Was any of that boy still there, behind slowly-dimming irises, someday again to be found?

Come back, boy. I need you.

He was jealous of people with tough upbringings. Perhaps one would have saved him from his life.