The Rotting Fig Tree.

Dedicated to former gifted children who are now drowning in mediocrity.

When I was fourteen, all I could think about was what I was going to be; now, at twenty-two, all I can think about is what I was. Throughout my teens, I was constantly running a marathon between expectations and potential, and silently—yet violently—my dreams underwent a metamorphosis.

I was going to be a famous left-handed cricket bowler, a diligent civil servant, and then an English professor, even though I could not tell Blake from Byron, nor Beowulf from Virginia Woolf. Somewhere along the way, my dreams lost their shape and colour. I will become “that” somehow traversed into I will become “something”. Everybody has to be something, and I believed that my potential was nothing but an inevitability.

At this juncture—paralysed by uncertainty and running aloof along the shiny, white, pearl path of my former self—I realised that I was not really carrying any real goals, but rather illusions of what I could be and should be: visions my mind conceived based on the notions other people held of me.

And, like a ritual, I keep placing myself into the shoes of Esther Greenwood from The Bell Jar, where she speaks of the fig tree with all its ripe figs, each representing someone she could be. But at least Plath had the disease of creativity, which allowed her to visualise and live all the versions of herself through words and characters.

Per contra, my fig tree is rotten, and I see none of its branches reaching out to me. All that embraces me is a huge, shallow trunk—huge because it is a ghost mimicking my potential, and shallow because I do not know the shape, colour, nor the smell of the something—or someone—I want to be.

Theology interests me, and so does astronomy. I do not think I can study religion because I would rather do science, and I cannot study science because I have never been good at mathematics. I want to read Dostoevsky and understand Nietzsche, but I would rather use that time to finish my Company Law syllabus because exams are coming up.

I am too scared of doing nothing while also being too cautious to start something, when in truth I want to be everything, everywhere, all at once (not a reference to the movie). The truth is, I am a body made of excuses, wearing a skin that can be a lot but ends up being nothing far too often. A huge mango tree with beautiful green leaves but no yellow fruits. A promise you know can be kept, yet remains unfulfilled.

Alas, December feels like salvation—as if the onset of a new year can magically cleanse me of the stench of wasted potential from the year before.

Come January, I shall either be Doreen (The Bell Jar), or end up being Meursault from The Stranger.

Yours anxiously,

Caligo.

P.s. we should reclaim the em-dash and semi colon from AI.