Sombremesa

"To Live, would be an awfully big adventure" - Peter Pan, JM Barrie

  
Dear Stranger,

This seems to be an opportune time for odd lilting conversation, not that there is ever an inopportune time for subjectivity. I find myself at a new beginning today and for some odd reason I feel the need to share this one with the likes of a likeness I cannot fully deconstruct. This beginning comes in the form of a document, emailed to me this morning, a document in a foreign language that proclaims the finalizing of my divorce. Seeing as I currently lack a confidant, I now find myself constructing one in this letter. You might think this a morbidly rococo juxtaposition on my part and you would be right. I am seeking attention, as loathe as I am to admit it. That said, I do not know whose attention it is I am soliciting and on some off tangent this anonymity awards me a small measure of comfort. 

 I am twisting my mind around this loveliest of Spanish words 'Sombremesa'. It makes reference to times spent around the table after dinner, talking to the people one shared the meal with. It is time spent digesting both the food and the fragile foundations of friendship. I am unsure about whether I can classify my recent socializing around tables as 'the sharing of meals' in any genuine sense of the word but it would not be dishonest of me to assert that somewhat-edible or better put, perishable, items were consumed. And sufficient time was taken to savour them sufficiently. Perhaps classifying the subtle stringing together of loose-ended misnomers and post-substance metaphysics as the beginnings of a friendship may be a stretch but whatever the cumulative repercussions of this Sombremesa, they appear to be favorable. They are certainly compelling and jarringly, cripplingly honest. I do not know if this is how one cultivates a friendship, by cloaking ones' self at the onset, imbibing several social facilitators in the middle and stripping bare at the end? Is this the basis of an acquaintance-ship that lasts? Or is it a peer-ship? Or is it merely an almost-recognise-her-face-ship?

One might think of this particular variant of letter writing as a bout of triviality but I feel that the importance of saying things and having them matter to someone can never really be under or over estimated. That said, there is no way of knowing whether any of what I shall say here will matter to anyone, but in some part this disinterest is also oddly consoling. I shall never know, who you are, who I am addressing or how you are being addressed and that means we can converse freely. Or that I can vent freely, whatever Kafkaesque parable better suits your purpose. I suppose in some manner, I am setting this fictive conversation against real ones I have just encountered trying to test the boundaries of my own limitations as both a wordsmith and human-oid. I fear that I have indulged myself beyond my capacity for self-indulgence. I fear too that I have educated myself beyond my intelligence. I fear finally, that I have experienced a sense of complacence. I fear most of all that I am enjoying it. 

 “They took it for granted that if they went he would go also, but really they scarcely cared. Thus children are ever so ready, when novelty knocks, to desert their dearest ones.”

Perhaps you are bored already. This is, after all, a purely selfish catharsis on my part and will afford you nothing of value in exchange, no vindication, no valor...not even a pedestal. I have always envied people their chance to compose long intimate letters in films, the kind one finds being superimposed at the preface or conclusion of a historical biopic. I wish that I could compose these words on an aged papyrus scroll with a quill and scratchy, blotchy ink to preserve the perverse nostalgia and neologism I am attempting to bring here, while my defenses are down enough to award me the indulgence. Silicon screens and clacking keys are so utterly unromantic but they cannot be helped. If I were given the choice I would have employed pencils. This is something you actually should know about me…I adore pencils. Ever since I watched that magnum of romantic comedies, ‘You’ve got Mail’, I have relished the idea of someday receiving a ‘bouquet of sharpened pencils’. I would write you this letter in pencil if I knew who you were and I assure you it would serve more poignantly than those crass love notes composed in blood by clumsy lovers.

I am not sure if I am going about this the right way, or if there even is such a thing. After all, how does one construct an intimacy? In normal situations people consider approaching a curious stranger and striking up a conversation, others employ that age-old art known as flirtation. Some stalk people on Facebook and Twitter…whichever method one employs, there is a subtle loss of self that is demanded of the enterprise. The twisted waltz of socializing requires one person to initiate the exchange, invent an approach and meticulously cultivate an opening. There are moments in between, where every perverse slip-of-tongue and every arbitrary hand gesture is superimposed in the idle vignette of ones' clouded retinas and encased in the hazy short term memory one is desperately trying to wipe clean with a hyperbolic blend of potent substances. Each layer added, removes a layer of self-consciousness and superimposes something about the self one was unaware of in their own capacity. I find I talk too much, so I try to pace myself. That pace allows me the time to think and then I find I am thinking too much and immediately switch to talking again. I discover I can be crass, and this is an odd jolt for me. I have always been quiet and polite, you see, now I am discovering a boorish element in my jip-jive conversation that occasionally leads me to question whether my current choice of social conduits will cause lasting damage. 

"Stars are beautiful, but they may not take an active part in anything, they must just look on for ever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was. So the older ones have become glassy-eyed and seldom speak (winking is the star language), but the little ones still wonder."

In my mind this involves a loss of power or ego or something that I know I do not possess in any case, but the idea of losing it is overwhelming enough to hold me at bay. This is why I have never triumphed in matters of the heart…or the libido, if you belong to the school of thought that prefers to distinguish between the two. I have no one to be intimate with, so I have ascertained that in such times it is best to muster up all of ones’ creativity and invent a confidant. It is not so difficult really, inventing intimacy. All the enterprise really requires is cause enough to warrant confession. In our case, somewhat of a soliloquy wrought in affection. The inventory for intimacy essentially rests on three things, I find. The first involves the right number of 'others' to cloak your conversation in sufficient banality so that the few sentences you mean to make poignant can be identified in contrast to all the nonsense. This is paramount, for conversations that try to be important in their entirety inevitably fail from the fall-out of sheer expectation. The second, is a viable target. Someone you are capable of surprising with your odd sensibilities but someone whose reactions you are not too invested in. This ensures that if a transient intimacy is actually struck, it will be equally surprising for both parties and then promptly dismissed as a serendipitous fluke. It is essential that it be dismissed so as not to become dangerous. The third and final premise for inventing intimacy is eye-contact...or the lack thereof. This is as much a science as an art...one must measure connected gazes meticulously against stolen ones and disconnects. No one should be too aware of being the subject of your scrutiny at any given point of time but someone actually must be the subject. It is a perverse scavenger hunt for smiles and sibilant undertones. So here, I shall address you as an old friend and pick up an imaginary conversation left at the tail end of our previous encounter, one that I shall construct as we go along. 

 But where do you live mostly now?"
With the lost boys."
Who are they?"
They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expanses. I'm captain."
What fun it must be!"
Yes," said cunning Peter, "but we are rather lonely. You see we have no female companionship."
Are none of the others girls?"
Oh no; girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.”

 The last time we met we were contemplating the merits of the term ‘spiritual’. You were dressed casually, as you are wont to do, sitting cross legged on my sofa and denigrating me for my desperate need to find ‘meaning’ in ‘meaningless things’ that I stumble upon. I suppose, in this construction and this particular letter, you are a man. I have known you for years, long enough to experience an odd, compulsive possessiveness with regards to you and simultaneously long enough for me to be all-too-aware of your romantic failings to let this attraction manifest beyond the odd tingle in my toes or the flutter in my chest when you laugh at something I have said. One is told, that this degree of a physical charge is biologically predetermined and does not really warrant much deeper consideration on either of our parts. We are friends - in that overtly comfortable sense of the word that does not really necessitate the validation of a facebook request or a regular phone call. We are in the habit of watching films on the telephone after having discovered that it is one of the few television clichés that actually does translate beyond Gossip Girl. We do not open conversations with 'Hello's and Goodbyes' but rather with pithy one-liners that ensure the illusion of a stream of thought flowing without interruption in spite of all all the interruptions that life necessitates for us both. I find that I'm always doomed to construct you in my head as Pan. It is a most unforgivable pathetic-ality on my part. A perpetual, perennial itch to save and savor the act of loving rather than the person I am loving. The irony, of course being that, of perhaps all literary heroins I have never loathed any more than Wendy. She is the constant touchstone of every woman's underlying need to rescue and rehabilitate a man or woman or beast, and for lack of opportunity, to construct a Pan that needs saving in every stray that crosses her path. Wendy is Freud's very own thing-that-goes-bump-in-the-night of tremors and testosterone.

“I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads on the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with sex elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate-pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine threepence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still." 

  

You are in a habit of pointing out my sentimentality as a fatal flaw. You warn me repeatedly that my romance with the idea of romance is more doomed than any star crossed cupidity available on a book shelf or to be found on screen. Spirituality, you tell me is what people call their need to connect the inanity of their existence with the majesty of the stars. “There is no connection but we want one. So we have made it up. Whenever we find ourselves boring, we fake ourselves some majesty like pixie dust.” I can never seem to argue you away but I know I disagree with you. My mind knows you can be dis proven but only by someone who can articulate my own arguments far better than I. I resent this charge of plagiarism because I fear there is an obvious truth in it. And while I am willing to be proven wrong, the idea of being 'obviously' wrong grates against my skin.

You tell me one doesn’t need any of these labels and that life can be spent merely on the peripheries of the events that live us. We can just be, you say. There is no cause for spirituality in that. There are times when I feel you are a nihilist who only associates with me because you find my fanciful nature amusing. Or perhaps you are lonely enough, to want to live vicariously through someone who feels as much of everything as I do, so you can keep numbing yourself and retain the upper hand. I find that I miss our conversations after they end and therefore I am trying to plagiarize the tail end of them in this exhibitionist venture. Naturally this is a misnomer, considering there was no conversation to begin with and you (who read this) are in all probability, not the person I am trying to speak to because I am not trying to speak to someone but for them. This is through no fault of your own but rather because of my colossal failings as a perennial verbal and emotional fidget. 

 “Peter: Oh, the cleverness of me.
Wendy: Of course, I did nothing...
Peter: You did a little. 

Wendy: Oh, the cleverness of you.”

 I suppose for this letter to be truly two-sided and honest, neither of which it is, I am obliged to ask after your health and general well being. I hope for your happiness. Moreover, I hope that you are one of those individuals who do not expect happiness in general and are therefore pleasantly surprised on the odd days where you find yourself contemplating the meaning of your existence in a good, strong cup of coffee and find your faith, sitting at the wheel, waiting for a traffic light to change in the middle of the rain. I hope that you are not the narcissist I am dreaming you up to be and I hope that I am not in love with you already. I hope you are a firm, solid, stable quadrant in this dizzy world and I hope you resist all of my melodramatic ministrations and not-so-subtle manipulations on this forum to render you otherwise. I hope you are able to forgive me my desperation. 

"You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.”  "

 

I pray, dear Stranger, that you will excuse my clumsy attempts at keeping this archaic romance alive, not with you per se, but with the idea of you. I am afraid that most of my ideas are the dying legacy of some long-lost antique cousin and that I should let them pass peacefully but I find that I am not quite prepared to lay you to rest yet.

You, who speak in sublimation's as I do.

You, who struggle with premises and prefaces alike,

You, who also, are forever incomplete.

And wish to remain so….

“There is a saying in the Neverland that,every time you breathe, a grown-up dies."

侘寂 Wabi-Sabi

“It's too late to be grateful. It's too late to be hateful. It’s too late to be late again…Everywhere I looked, demons of the future [were] on the battlegrounds of one’s emotional plane.” – David Bowie

It felt like the kind of high you never come down from… until you hear yourself saying that out loud shattering the jelly-laced bubble boosting your ego to a spectrum you had hitherto only conceived of conceiving. You know it can’t last. And there you have it, a split-second in and you’ve sunk so low, you’re practically scraping the sea-bed for a warm shore. Bowie once said something along the lines of “it’s not the side-effects of the high, I’m thinking that it must be love”. Ironic how one learns to love themselves in the forgotten minutes of riding a high you don’t deserve on a substance you shouldn’t substantiate.

The Japanese hold sacred an 'aesthetic of the flawed', which is paramount in their understanding of the human mind. The Wabi-Sabi is seldom explained but is revered in intonation, of both the Samurai and the layman, as that perfection in imperfection…often alluded to as the beauty of the imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. The same lifeline also prevails in the Buddhist first noble truth of the Dukkha, Kanji that beleaguers perfectionists as being without spirit and clinging to tattered emotional and logical anchors to preserve a sense of self. I have a bit of a reputation for being quite guarded about my anchors and I have always coveted their presence in my life. I must confess I am a complete stranger to the Wabi-Sabi but I am finally beginning to appreciate its undertones.

These days, I appear hell bent on living without myself. I am making it a point to abandon all senses and tenses of the I, that I affiliate with myself, every time I walk out of my front door. It seems to be working… whatever that means. I no longer recognize my reflection. I suppose that was the point, to elevate my personality from its previous peripheries along the art of time-suckage to actually experiencing hedonism in its essence. It is said that in some cultures it is considered good luck to wear one’s socks inside out. I am testing this theory at elevated modules by wearing myself skin-side out for the first time. Open to experiences but closed to letting them truly penetrate lest I buy into the farce that I know I am operating in at present. It is an odd arithmetic, all even numbers and nuances removed. All self-effacing shadows held at bay. I know it couldn’t possibly last. My three-month sabbatical is nearly up and I am still unsure about whether I want to stay on in this city and look for work. I fear I will lose that girl I once recognized who saw life trickle through the sieve of precariously measured do’s and don’ts that she would allow herself. I am not that girl at present. This simultaneously scares and sustains me. A Wizard of Was skips hand in hand with me each time I find myself transgressing against one of my many moral monitors. They seem to be cross with me and I am luxuriating in that pool of bile.

At present I am riding the tail-end of my first high located alongside a thin, crooked line. I am not sure if this is my act of reticence or revolt. In all honesty, it seems to be an odd blend of both. I feel powerful - invincible even, for a few moments - and this is something I cannot comprehend. It lasts a split-second and the Id cultivated by this high descends as the guilt for experiencing self-satisfaction sets in. I seem to be programmed against self-confidence but I have faked it often enough to recognize the real thing when it slams into me.

I could get used to this, I feel.

I can’t get used to that feeling.

There is a perverse Modus Ponens operating around my guilt as I feel the words rush through my mind quicker than my hands can keep up with them. In propositional logic Modus Ponendo Ponens, is Latin for ‘the way that affirms by affirming’ – it is the implication elimination that rests on simple argument formations and the rule of inference. M implies A, and if M is asserted to be true, so therefore must A be. It is logic that dates back to antiquity but is in no way antiquated. If the me I am cultivating with foreign experiences and foreign substances abound (M) is actually proven to be a true variant of my personality, so must the me I have relegated on pause (A) be true of that setting. I am not sure if I am disproving my former self, or re-affirming her. I am slightly disoriented by the algorithms of this social experiment I am conducting on my own person. That said, I take some comfort in the fact that Modus Ponens is not a logical law, instead it is a construction and an anchor for defining and confining substitution. It is art as much as math. I feel I can play with the art of mathematics, as long as I keep my bearings enough to not let this logic run the other way around.

I am beginning to fear my ability with regards to contriving such an elaborate deception effectively. This is foreign terrain, and yet these tiny, flaky crooked lines elicit surprisingly potent emotions. I have never before witnessed so complete a submission by so many people at once, to something that never demanded it. Perhaps it is just a metaphor for many missing moments and I am trying to fill in my own blanks but I am brought to Sherlock Holmes’ musings about emoting and demoting certain vices in ‘The Sign of Four’.

“A seven-percent solution. Would you care to try it?” He asks.

“No, Indeed,” I answered brusquely. “My constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet. I cannot afford to throw any extra strain upon it.”

He smiled at my vehemence. “Perhaps you are right, Watson,” he said. “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendentally stimulating and clarifying to the mind 

that its secondary action is a matter of a small moment.”

I know, I shall move forward from this and not return to this juncture. If the point of this particular sabbatical-sojourn-social experiment is to try everything (addendum: almost everything) once, than I have been here. I shall not visit again. I hope.

Still, I cannot deny the clouded illusion of self-love I recall having experienced. I can see why this would bring people of a certain constant self-loathing back again. I can see why it would keep them here. I am tempted. Or perhaps I am merely addicted to the act of saying things and having them matter to someone.

Vini. Vidi. Vici  Victus Fuero

I came. I saw.

...I am conquered.

Diamonds on the Soles of His Shoes

“Treat each other like human beings? Of course, for the other great apes have no class hierarchy.”

-Bauvard, Evergreens Are Prudish

‘Le lo na’

On auto-pilot loop, he keeps saying it, over and over and over again. He repeats the same phrase every 15 seconds for ten minutes straight almost in the sibilant semblance of the Gaytri Mantra. I wish I were in a car right now, simply because he’s made it impossible for me to drown him out. I have no windows to put between us right now. Wasn’t it Audrey Hepburn who said ‘Life is like a limousine. There’s a front seat, a back seat and a window in between’? One has to admit Audrey practically invented class and she elevated it to a thing of beauty …. 'Le lo na, Baji’…ugh. There is no way, at present, of relegating his presence to just an irritant *tap* tap* tap* on a rolled up window. He stands right in front of me making it nearly impossible to escape his line of vision… or my line of vision, depending on which end of the spectrum one is speaking from or of or to. 

This one is better dressed than most street urchins ever dare to be if they still want to deserve some empathy from their would-be, could-be benefactors. He’s toeing a precarious line, trying to balance being ‘felt sorry for’ by still looking like he doesn’t really need the actual pity that accompanies it. It takes a certain kind of gumption, if one thinks about it. A more technically inclined individual might even posit that this one ranks lower than his peers on the empathy-equivalent seeing as he does not possess in spades, the obvious adorab-ility of the whiter, bonny-cheeked beggars who do not need to dress down to tug at the tightest wound heart strings. One might even say he was taking a risk; either that or he had somehow miraculously managed to maintain a shred of self-esteem regarding his own appearance. Either way, he was an anomaly and anomalies are always uncomfortable in social standards. My mental ministrations are heightened in an attempt to keep his pleading at bay…I picture him as James Dean for a split second and I snort at my own musings.

Rebel without a Cause, indeed. 

He wears Bubble Gummers, only slightly torn and frayed at the edges and his shalwar kameez is barely even patchy. If anything, it looks pressed and it matches. The embroidery at the cuffs and collar is only slightly faded, which seems inexcusably presumptuous. He wears a Lakers baseball cap and it affords a bright flash of fierce violet roped in with mango yellow to shade his patchy skin. His face is an odd conglomerate of contradictions. There are two oozing pimples, two dry patches marking the edges of his lips…one would imagine they would be concealed perfectly if he smiled. There is the customary lake of dried snot settled beneath his left nostril. The contradictions are afforded in the handsomely high cheek bones, the perfect nose and the eyes. His eyes are a stunning aqua, the kind with an odd golden flake thrown in here and there to attract even the most dismissive of onlookers. The fact that he’s better off than most street urchins I’ve ever seen actually makes him harder to dismiss and this is an odd prefix. I am uncomfortably aware of the odd bout of empathy I am experiencing and cannot quite place. This isn’t exactly a social setting I am comfortable with: turning off our ‘humanity switch’, as The Vampire Diaries would have us believe , is a pretty standard practice when confronted with bitter realities. He is becoming uncomfortably human in his persistence. Human enough to want to clean up and ‘save’.

‘Le lo na. Le lo na Baji’

Somewhere, in the last 5 minutes, he just elevated himself from the legions of ragged and patched children I was comfortable ranking as sub-human enough to ignore. What troubles me is I do not know how he did it and it makes for a dangerous precedent. This one is getting under my skin and that scares me. This one elicits feelings.

He lingers stubbornly on the periphery of five women (myself included), waiting to board a bus to Murree. All of us, safely hiding behind our sunglasses. All of us oozing annoyance and holding empathy at bay, as practice has perfected us to do.

‘Le lo na. Le lo na Baji’

He’s been told to leave at least fifteen times, two of us even gave him 5 rupees each but he persists, and while this would otherwise make him more annoying it somehow makes him compelling in this suspended moment on a random mountain. Perhaps it is the fact that he looks me in the eye until I have to look away. He is disconcerting and he is moving closer…too close. He seems to have skipped the subliminal social training that prohibits one of his kind from touching one of mine. He tugs at my sleeve and I shoo him away as if he’s stung me. The woman sitting next to me, assumes a mantle I did not endorse, for fear that she might be next. She points at his cap and comments about whether he even knows what it says. Another one points at his shoes and laughs. The left sneaker is still flickering softly with each step, the red lights embedded in the rubber sole blinking out their final gasping breaths as he backs away.

 He is finally aware of himself. Finally aware that he has transgressed and penetrated an invisible layer of placenta that cocoons us from the likes of him. Look but don’t touch.

One can tell that he used to be proud of those sneakers. It seems to be the one thing he didn’t yet realize, that they were outdated and even worse…local. He cracks. His confidence and borderline cockiness melts off his face, down his shoulders, filters into his thighs and congeals heavily in his knee caps. His step falters slightly as he backs away from us. He’s a fighter, but no one can win against a machete taken to their ego. Laughter breaks barriers well enough but it breaks people much quicker. Still, he juts out his chin as his eyes pool with tears. He can’t get away fast enough now as the giggles cascade over his back and his shadow stretches across the road growing larger and larger as he diminishes with each step.

I finally feel.

I think.

Moreover, I feel that I need to acknowledge this feeling as I sit amidst the other women, writing in my notebook.  Something tells me that if I don’t feel this, I will remain ‘this’ person. And at this particular precipice, I cannot swallow my own saliva for fear that it will poison me.

I head over to him a few feet away, as he sits with his head hunched over his small box of ‘Chilli Millis’.

‘Kitne Ka he?’

He is pouting and proud but he still needs to make a sale. In that moment, I envy him his social shield for I am completely naked and I can feel the whispers of the women wash over the both of us. I realize I am the target this time. It was to be expected, I suppose. I am not sanctimonious enough to begrudge them their apathy but apparently I am sanctimonious enough to need to distance myself from it. It is an uncomfortable tangent either way.

‘10 Rupe Ka.’

‘Tum Ne to Pehle 5 Ka Kaha Tha. 5 Ka Nahin He?  I’m not going to lose ground that easily.

‘Nahin! 5 Mein ne Kamana Hai!’ Apparently, neither was he.

Like I said, rebel without a cause. Still, I had to admire his moxy, especially since he didn’t even use it as a sales pitch. I give him Rs110, five for his kamai and an additional 100 to assuage my guilt. I pause for a second to absorb the fact that in this particular exchange, the cost of guilt is 100 rupees. Quite the bargain. It didn’t make him happy though, he doesn’t even look up to acknowledge the red note over the green. His ego is costs more than my guilt. He is a beggar with principles and I am a brigand without. In that moment, we are both social reprobates but his misdemeanors are honest, while mine are self-aggrandizing.

In a moment of latent humanity, I realize that the only way to correct my former offense is to touch him back, so I stick out my hand. He looks at me, measures me, makes me wait…rather pathetically, but finally takes it. This time I am relieved at his touch. His name is Bilal, he informs me. I rustle his hair, and it’s that odd, sun burnt, straw texture that is the cumulative product of mountain climate, street dust and lack of conditioner.

‘Mujhe hasna nahin chaahiye tha. Tumhare joote bahut pyaare hein.’

‘Doosre wali light ko kya hua?’ I try to make conversation before I head back to face the firing squad.

‘Woh bujh gayi.’

I return to my flock only to be met with soft glares. I can feel them even through their sunglasses. I turned tides somewhere in the last three minutes and it was a far greater offense than occasionally refusing to share my lunch with the womenfolk during lunch break. I had shamed my own.

I sit down to read a book and find myself periodically glancing at Bilal in between skimming pages. He has moved lower down the hill and is waiting outside a school boundary for his friends to finish their day and finally come out to play.

For now, he and I, share the same social periphery.

It is a beautifully overcast day and I feel beautifully outcast.