Leader of Men

The leader of men and child prodigy began masturbating in front of the cooking eggs and wondered if he could finish before they did.

My parents always told me I would be a great leader of men. I was shaving my patchy beard and checking my receding hairline. "This is not the face of a leader," I thought. I put down the cigarette in the sink.

I lived in a small condo outside Madrid, filled with cockroaches. I had studied all my life, basically since the gift of consciousness. Sit on a chair six hours straight, listen to sad women preaching, making circumstantial friendships, circumstantial small talk. Stress, stress, stress—for about 20 years. I did it “for my future.”

"Without a degree at least you won’t starve," used to say the old man.
"Okay, dad."

Good news is, I wasn’t starving, and one of my three dreams had come true: I lived alone. It was a 25 square meter kind of situation. The shower, sink, and rubbish were right there in the kitchen, which was also the dining room. Then there was a small, 2-square-meter space the landlord named “living room.” A small screen TV that I had never turned on, a small window that showed the concrete of the building in front, and a small staircase—very vertical—brought me to the bedroom, somehow placed right beneath the ceiling. I could barely sit on the bed. It was 800 a month, plus water and electricity.

As I finished shaving my beard, I wondered how much money I could still spend on tobacco if I wanted to pay rent. The smell of bacon came from the kitchen, 20 cm from where I was standing. I ate eggs and bacon every morning and wondered if I could get cancer from it.

"Where are all the old 'friends' of mine I had in uni or high school? How did they end up living?"

I studied a full-on finance degree + master’s. I was sleeping on a bed I couldn’t fuck on. No prospect of ever owning a house, less so of having children.

How were my old friends who didn’t even finish bachillerato doing?... Then I remembered—they all had houses. Well, their parents did. In the past, you studied because you were rich and could afford it. Nowadays, the need to study is a thing of the poor.

The leader of men and child prodigy began masturbating in front of the cooking eggs and wondered if he could finish before they did.

He won.

While I cleaned my hand, the eggs overcooked.

Exited for work. I could not afford the luxury of gasoline and so convinced myself that I didn’t need a car in Madrid. That it was counterproductive. So I took the bus.

Watching all those dead people sitting there on the seats made me wonder if all my life experiences—deemed less than, boring, superfluous, redundant—would have been a luxury to them.

I watched an old man, with three layers of fat beneath his armpits and an ugly nose. I wondered if someone ever told him "I love you."

They did to me, but I didn’t care. Not in the way you should.

Maybe that fat man should have lived that.

I could tell all about work, but why speak of the worst thing in life? I worked in an investment fund, doing an okay job in an okay position. Lots of unbearable women, bootlickers. I didn’t care enough for the job to bootlick, but I cared about eating, so I sometimes smiled at jokes, said hello to people, did my job at least. Just like those twenty years of education taught me—but now it wasn’t six hours a day, it was eight.

And the worst thing is that I had no idea where this sense of superiority came from. I always thought we were rich or meant to be. I didn’t speak with an accent. I spoke properly (in my native language). I saw myself as a prince amongst men.

What an insufferable little jerk I must have been. If only I had known I would end up just like those people that could barely talk. I may have killed myself before. I thought of doing it while driving, but I had to sell the car.

Anyways, back to my crib I was. As I did six floors with no elevator, I thought about my glutes and whether those staircases could somehow compensate for 20 years sitting down in the library.

I thought of Oxford. I thought about the memories I would make at uni. I tried to remember my uni period and found out it was worse than bachillerato. And bachillerato to me was 1984 with estrogens. Had all the bad parts but none of the good parts.

I didn’t even fuck a single girl from college. I stayed there six years.

There was one. Her name was Claudia, Colombian. Five-one. Cute but not especially beautiful. She looked like a child. She was serious most of the time but couldn’t hold a laugh with me. She laughed in such a cringey way, so opposite to her usual pose…it was funny.

Throughout the school years, I used her as an outlet to make fun of people and the school—and myself. She would ask me a lot of personal questions at the worst times. Some of them were psychoanalytical, like: "Do you consider yourself x, y or z?"

Well, they weren’t analytical. They were similar to those internet tests that tell you what house of Hogwarts you should be in. I laughed.

As an old girlfriend told me, they were trying to study me. I was like a foreign, exotic creature that spoke of the weirdest things in the weirdest ways. They had no idea where those ideas came from.

I did. They weren’t all mine. About four of them were.

Eventually, after four years of occasionally speaking after class or while eating, I realized she was very into me. I always kinda knew it, but I respected the way she hid it, giving me the weird hate stares her little face could generate. Like saying "I don’t like you, I don’t like you, I don’t like you..."

We met two times outside of uni. I never met anyone from uni outside of uni. She came all the way from the south of Tenerife to the north just to see me.

At the time I had a car. A beautiful Honda Civic 1999. I kissed her after dinner and brought her to a solitary place. I fantasized about corrupting her. She was a virgin and evangelical.

When she told me she was a virgin, I believed her—because it wasn’t the first time I deflowered an evangelical girl.

My fantasies were about forcefully undressing her, getting a grip of her hair and head, and forcing her to choke on it. Then, respecting her intact hymen, fuck her in her small, diminutive ass.

What really happened was that we kissed for about ten minutes, I found resistance when I tried to undress her small tits, convinced her to let me suck on them, then rubbed a bit of her clit, made her moan while she found the way to my dick. Jerked it un-experiencedly, refused to put it in her mouth. She came, I did it gritting my teeth because of the friction. I came on her jeans.

Then I drove back to my house where I lived with my parents: 70 square meters, two bedrooms, four people, and two dogs.

Not especially the kind of fun I expected to have as a 23-year-old uni student.

Then I thought I could have nothing. Was nothing that much worse than this?

I had more savage, dirty, bold sex when I was 18 and didn’t know how to make a girl come. Already felt like a man that doesn’t have that kind of sex anymore. It wasn’t expected of me.

Anyways, I picked up the phone and called the girl I had at the time. I laughed while I smoked out of the window. It was cool to speak with someone after work.

Nothing would have, indeed, been worse.

It was the most boring conversation of the week though. I made all the jokes that I knew would make her laugh. I did all that just to not feel alone.

She couldn’t come to see me. I said I love you and turned off the phone.

What a miserable beast, the one who is scared to be alone.

I wasn’t. I was just lazy.

I masturbated twice, watched two hours of stupid content online, had a crisis at 3 AM, and wrote everything in my diary just to not do anything the next day.