"Oh, please, stop with your bull-"
"I am well-aware that it sounds extremely pretentious. I know exactly what you, and other people, think when I say that I am not. But you tell me, what other words can I use that will convince you? I know what goes on inside my head, only I do. I also know why nobody will listen to me. But just because I look like I have everything together, does not mean I am a genius.
I have never once felt like a genius in my life. Hell, I have never felt like I was worth a penny of what was spent on me. Having loving parents felt like a privilege, and it felt like I was undeserving of it, and that feeling is something I would pay everything I own to get rid of. It hurts.
I wanted to be the perfect child so I could reduce the weight of feeling like a burden. I knew full well that my parents loved me no matter what I did or chose, and would continue to do the same till the day I die; maybe even after. It helped increase my feeling of indebtedness that I understood the struggles they had to go through to raise me. But they never spoke of it to me, not once.
Do you think that it is easy to be composed all the time? Sick feelings of inferiority and insecurity are always haunting you, ridding you of all senses of worth and harrowing you with taunts of pretension, making you feel like you simply must be a shadow so immaculate it does not stand out as unique, a perfect statistic that makes up a fraction of the data you see around you in the world.
Please don't call me a genius, because I am not one."
I didn't know. I wanted to apologise, but I felt like it would invalidate my point. Or maybe it was because I didn't want to admit that I was in the wrong.
"Let's play a game."
"What game?"
"It's a game my friend and I invented."
"You have friends?"
"What's your favourite word?"
"I don't have one."
"Really?"
"Yeah, I can't choose between things for the life of me." He paused. "Why do you want to know about people's favourite words?" He sounded... suspicious?
"Well, there's so many things about a word that can make it beautiful; it could be just the sounding of the word, or the way it looks in ink. The duality of the word; the hope it could bring or the finality it could mean, the butterflies it can bring in one's stomach."
"What's yours, then?"
"It's extremely hard to choose."
He thought about it for a second. "Pick the shortest one."
I looked around for the inspiration that rescued me when my mind drew a blank. Ahead us lay a new intersection diverging into four paths.
"Map."
"Why?"
"A map," I began, "has never been the representation of what the world is, it has always been our interpretation. We can draw maps for anything, even for the stars. There's a certain freedom you feel when you set sail without a map, or when you set sail with a map you drafted for yourself."
We turned into the same lane, the leftmost one.
"I like this game."
"What's yours?"
He said it in a heartbeat.
