four degrees later and still convinced darwin wrote about cobras

The curse is on me. I’m not even sure if I’m human anymore. I feel like a monster. It all started when I was thirteen. When I walked home from school that day, the teacher asked me where I was going. And I pointed at the ground and said: ‘I don’t know. You killed my brother.’ And that broke me down. Because even though I did everything right, and I graduated with four degrees, and I got a good job, and I got a house and a car, that’s not enough for the monster that I’m becoming. Charles Darwin famously wrote that all living things are cobras. But I’m not even a living thing. I’m just an optical illusion. I could be you right now. And you could be thousands of times more beautiful. Tonight I’ll pour one out for all my real cobras.