War of the Worlds

I haven't finished talking about the reunion yet.

Do you ever feel like you don't belong?  Not simply a stranger in a foreign land, where things are different but recognisable, but an alien in another world, surrounded by new, unimaginable things.  Do you look at things that have meaning and worth to their owners, but seem ridiculously irrelevant to you, or worse, do those same objects appear bright and shiny?  Do you covet them?   Do you feel as if you did not originate from the same place as everyone around you and you are there, at best, under sufferance, at worst as an invasive species. Like Wells'  Martians - at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous.  That's how I felt.  For a long time.  

I'm still not sure where I do belong.  As I get older, more and more, I feel that gulf of space.  Over time it seems to widen.  Imperceptibly, but absolutely.  Moving further and further apart from a time and place where I did belong.  Watching it slowly disappear.  Spying on the lives of my childhood friends through the medium of Facebook, I empathised with those aforementioned aliens rather than with my friends.  Their minds may not have had as little meaning to me as those of the beasts that perish, but their lives fascinated me, drawing me in, and with my "intellect, vast and cool and unsympathetic I regarded their earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew my plans against them".  Like the beings in War of the Worlds, across the gulf of Space, I watched them, believing their stories of fame and fortune and glory.  Two decades ago I knew these people, laughed with them, cried with them.  I loved them and hated them. Then and now.  I knew them as children and I knew them as people. I wanted their world.  So I went.

But over the course of the evening my curiosity waned, my jealousy evaporated.  They were the same.  We were the same.  Older.  Fatter. Richer.  No wiser.  No happier.  In reality, most were miserable about some facet of their lives.  Regardless of geographical proximity, it seemed they all envied something others appeared to have.  We all had our red weed and our black smoke.  The stars we had seen as children had turned out to be way too high.  Like Wells' books, this story too has an epilogue.  When I look back on the significance of my personal invasion, I too have an "abiding sense of doubt and insecurity".  My invasion did not result in the creation of my own utopian world, where I could truly belong.  It left me empty and confused.  I also think I can feel a cold coming on...