I was born poor. Stole money, too, but only because I needed it and those I took it from didn’t.

      Even these beans I’m now chewing—and I’ve been eating them daily until things get better and I can afford a steak—even these beans would bring happiness to a ten-year-old me who ate banana peels and little paper balls at night to quiet his stomach and get some sleep and have strength for the next day. My original strength, the only one I ever had, came from peels and paper.

      I wasn’t always poor, though.

      When I came into the world my mother had nothing, but then I grew up and I was diligent until I wasn’t poor anymore. I really made something of myself for a while. I came from the favelas in Rio de Janeiro and went on to study and then give talks and go fancy places—I lectured in Buenos Aires and Seoul and San Francisco and they paid me good money for all of it. I’ve been to first-class restaurants, drank the finest wines (Malbec, I reminisce about you daily), went to see the best ensembles and orchestras. I was important and had emails to reply to and I was someone who “came from the gutter.”

      But it seems like I was meant to return to my original condition, God knows!

      Because I lost support of my previous peers and the offers dried up and now I’m poor again, back where I started—only difference is I’m eating canned beans instead of banana peels and paper balls, and not in the favelas anymore, but rather in St. Louis’ Fairground, where I still have to watch my back for the crackheads. That’s some improvement, to be sure, but I’m still a nobody.

      I think I’m starting to understand things now, though. I’m starting to understand why I returned to poverty.

 

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Aldo was my very first academic advisor. That’s after I was done with high school and went to college with much sweat and tears behind me. Mother was already dead so you can forget her (I don’t know why I keep bringing her up). Anyway, Aldo helped me write my dissertation that became a book later. He suggested many edits but I didn’t give a damn about anything he said—I ignored all his suggestions and went on and published it as it was anyway.

      So in the end it was none of his work, none of his merit. I gained traction and he lost his time.

      Or take Anna Maria, who gave me money and freedom to organize conferences when I was her postdoc, and the son of a bitch that I was—will you excuse me, Mother—the son of a bitch that I was only invited speakers who worked on themes that were important to me and my work, but not Anna Maria’s. Well, I did a lot of “networking” around that time of course, but my boss, she didn’t get much out of it. And why the hell didn’t I ever invite her to give the opening talks? Why didn’t I ever think she’d maybe like to be one of the speakers?

      Wasn’t I an ungrateful bastard?

      Sometimes I think eating paper balls damaged my brain.

      But now I’m thinking maybe there’s a law of human behavior—and if there isn’t one then there maybe should be—a law according to which the person who gains traction at the expense of others is bound to be stopped before they’re really happy. I think it’s this law that got me. Because it’s not like those people plotted against me and sabotaged my career or anything. Aldo and Anna Maria and the whole lot, I mean. It’s just how the world works. I was stopped before I was really happy, so that confirms my hypothesis.

      No, you know what, that IS a law of the universe, and I’ll be damned if there isn’t something like it in the Bible, no less, or in the Quran or in The Little Prince, maybe.

 

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The holes in my sweatpants aren’t even the worst part. The worst part is I don’t remember the last time they were clean. I feel mossy. On days like this one, I doubt my own haggard diagnoses of things. Other days I’m fairly certain of my thoughts because they’re more pointed and they shine like metal.

      Now I’m not sure it was the law anymore. Me and my damn “laws,” for Christ sakes!

      Perhaps the answer is to be found in ancient Indian wisdom and the caste system, rather.

      I could blame Western civilization—now that’s a thought—I could blame Western civilization and say our social structures should’ve kept me where I was supposed to be, and not give me the illusion I could be someone other than who I really am. I am ME, goddammit, hahahaha!

      So my first thought was correct after all. The first thought’s always the right one, I’ll tell you.

      Mother told me once—this before she went nuts and started throwing bottles on walls—Mother told me once she didn’t know whether she should marry or buy a bicycle. Is indecision genetic? Why, it could be. It’s possible that it was my indecision that messed things up for me and nothing else—I’ve been ambivalent besides ungrateful, after all. God, I don’t know what I did wrong!

      Now give me some change, will you? Give it to me, you arrogant prick, I have a PhD!

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September 2026, by Luis Rosa