Half Lives

Our half lives, postgraduates.

Don’t live like us! Don’t learn from us! Look at us! Look at what we’ve become! Our type is increasingly … ridiculous.

The more we’re out of time … The more the times are against us … Because they are against us. They don’t want us, the times. There’s no time for us in these times. We’re out of place. And increasingly so!

Perhaps you mistakenly find a kind of beauty to our irrelevance. To our anachronism. It’s like we have halos, or something. We’ve survived from another time. We’ve come from elsewhere. We’ve landed in his world – we couldn’t help it.

 

Don’t learn from us, postgraduates. From our mistakes. Because we’re nothing other than our mistakes, not really. We’ve only ever been mistaken. And deluded. And foolhardy.

 

We were lucky, that’s all, postgraduates. Or unlucky, depending on the way you see it. Will you be lucky, too? Probably not.

It’s going well for us – relatively well. We never had great expectations, it’s true. To be allowed to do what we do – that’s all. Whatever we do. And however we do it.

Allowed to muddle along, as best as we can. With our books. With our notebooks. With our reading and our writing. Indulged! But not for much longer.

 

Don’t think anything of us, postgraduates. Don’t think we deserve this life, or that we’ve earnt it.

We were lucky, in our way. We blundered unto it. We stumbled and were lifted up and found ourselves here. In Newcastle! In the far Northeast! We uprooted ourselves. We came all the way.

Are we making anything of ourselves? And what are we doing with ourselves? Just what we were doing before. Stumbling. And blundering. And pretending to be … lecturers, or whatever we are.

 

Look at us, postgraduates. Let it be a warning to you. Who you should not be. What not to be. Where you could go wrong.