Our house has an intramural soccer team. Antoine, my housemate, an exchange student from France, and our team captain has been approaching everybody in the house asking them to join the games. Maybe because I give off some sports vibes or maybe because we are friendly, he’s been asking me to come before every game.
“I don’t play sports. My presence would actually be bad for our team,” is the default answer that I give him.
It doesn’t work. He probably thinks that I’m being humble, which would be funny because I think that I have absolutely nothing to be humble about.
Anyway.
Today they started the game at 7.30 PM and since I had to go to work at 8, I decided to come see the game. Antoine got very happy and hugged me only to find out that I was not joining, that I was just stopping by. I felt guilty to a degree but at the same time I actually do not know how to play soccer.
They started playing.
A funny feeling crept up to me soon after the game started, as I started getting interested and cheering for our team. There I was, standing in front of the audience seats, my hands in the pockets of my army jacket, yelling, waving my hands. Have you ever seen actual team coaches at the games?
This suddenly put me in a childhood mode. I started pretending to be a coach, getting into a role, yelling louder, imitating them the best way I could.
I used to do that a lot, when I was a child. When I was writing homework, I would imagine being a scientist or an engineer or a philosopher working on difficult world-solving problems. Walking around, I would imagine being an old poet that looked at everything around himself and was constantly overwhelmed be the feelings that the surroundings evoked in him; planning to write a poem about this and about that. Same thing happened when I played sports, even though I had never been good at it. Standing behind everyone in defense, I would imagine being a big shot defense player at a prestigious club.
I forgot that. Somewhere along the way through high school and college, I completely forgot about that. Somewhere there I decided to try to find myself.
It didn’t work.
