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Bexistentialism: MT14 Week 6

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As Fifth Week ends, and I realise I still don’t know the freshers, I decide I should probably do something about it. Mission set, it is time for the approach.

I head to Formal. A group of freshers sit next to us. Midway through our starter I quip admiringly at a fresher, eating mussels using an empty mussel-shell. (No one believes that it’s how one is meant to eat mussels in pretentious spheres. It is. My voice is lost in the clatter of cutlery and insincere revelry.)

I drink. I gnaw at my young-entire-chicken-that-looks-like-a-headless-baby on my plate. Carry on chinking glasses. By coffee all has changed. A fresher on my left speaks to me! We have a conversation. A conversation! I begin to introduce myself, but it seems he already knows me. Oh. I ask how, and am delivered several reasons, ending in a pun quoted from the Merton-Weekly-Gossip-Publication: “Bexual tension”. Dismissing this miserable fate, I confess that I am feeling absent from the fresher ‘scene’. He tells me I have many fans. Wonderful! I think. I have managed to bluff my way into a few minds. But after a few mishearings, and a bout of sarcasm, I am unsure whether I have secured a hesitant friendship, or sealed off all potential with my usual passive-aggressive ceremony.

I leave disheartened, and approach the bar assertively inebriated. I see the fresher who once called me a ‘grumpy bitch’. We are yet to officially meet. I smile. Tell her I like her dress. There is a brief splutter. This might be harder than I thought.

The following night it is bop time. The theme is ‘Under the Sea’. Though my full-body shark costume has made appearances before, finally it is worn with relevance. So I waddle along to the JCR. Soon I am in sarcastic conversation with a fresher who is also dressed as a shark. But their cardboard fins, and board-marker gills, I tell them, are fucking insufficient. Did I do it again? Never have I felt more weighted by the curse of my indelible sarcastic façade.

The next morning, subdued by a tense and Fifth-Week-blues-blemished bop, I realise that my mission has readily evaporated. I open a Fanta with sad flourish and head to Welfare Tea. On the way over I receive a friend request from fellow shark guy. As I scout for more food, for my infinitely-unquenchable-welfare-tea-appetite, ‘Grumpy-Bitch-Accuser’ hands me a potato smiley. A delicate, starchy peace token. I think, just maybe, I achieved something. 

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