I’m the au pair with the jazz tapes, telling him to use Davis and Coltrane on the first date. The hero’s child­hood bud­dy, who dies in mor­tar fire dur­ing their ser­vice in the Second World War. The awk­ward friend who isn’t attrac­tive enough to play the lead. The sib­ling con­fi­dante, who con­tra­dicts the pro­tag­o­nist with cyn­i­cism, only to be proven wrong in a sat­is­fy­ing fit of glo­ry.

All my life, I dreamed of great­ness, of being the main char­ac­ter in some quixot­ic sto­ry.

But I’m slow­ly real­iz­ing that I’m only a deuter­ag­o­nist.

I wrote this entry about four or five months ago, but nev­er pub­lished it. I held off because I was­n’t sure if it would be true a week after I wrote it. Weeks turned into months, until the sud­den real­iza­tion that I don’t feel this way now.

I regret not pub­lish­ing it at the time. Even though it holds no rel­e­vance any­more, at the very least, it would have been a time stamp of how I felt in the moment. There are so many fleet­ing mem­o­ries and emo­tions that change here, part of my ephemer­al nature. But part of me thinks that it took this real­iza­tion to give me the strength to say it.

Maybe I’m start­ing to believe in myself.