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TWELVE STEP CHARLIE

[...] When an enlightenment of that proportion visits your house, you treat it delicately. You invite it in. You pour it drinks. You allow it to sit in your most comfortable chair. You play it its favourite music.
    You don’t waltz across such an epiphany with a Bulldozer. You don’t throw a toaster—the one you never used, anyway—into its bathwater, not even because it sat there soaking in its own dirty water for the past three hours.
     No! You treat it delicately.
    You don’t—like I did—say: I am Hugh Jackman’s twin brother! I believe I can fly! Bring it on!
    Because the last syllable of that last line was still somewhere between my vocal chord and my lip—and, thus, the world outside my head—when shit started hitting the fans.
    One day, Mr. Jackman announced in a heartfelt message to the world that, once again, he was hit by skin-cancer. This time on the nose. And on the nose it was, indeed.
    Because, I had only just recently—seconds ago—pronounced to the world I was pretty much like Mr. Jackman.
  Well, except for the fantastic body, but I made that up with equally fantastic grey hair—who are we kidding here anyway? And once you’re pretty much like Hugh Jackman, you go all the way. No?
    So then suddenly, I fast-forwarded my life to the point in which I sit in a pale doctor’s office listening to the words It Looks Rather Suspicious. It Might Be Skin-Cancer.
     When you’re Hugh Jackman, you not only have access to the best medical care. You have millions of fans to support you in your darkest, nose-less hours. When you’re Hugh Jackman, big sacs full of fan mail and Get Well Soon cards find your way. Even digitally.
    When you’re me, completely at ease with the fact that you are somewhat—in an alternative universe where time, orientation, geographical identity, weight and muscle tone don’t seem to be applied to any living thing—a vague, shadowy resemblance of a mega-star called Hugh Jackman, none of all that brotherly love can actually be assimilated into your welcome-to-planet-Earthly life. None of that actually happens to you. All of that only happens to Hugh Jackman. You just sit there in a tiny office with some weird skin-expert. Talking about skin-cancer—as if that’s actually a thing.
    And that’s the moment when real life takes over. That’s the moment when the life in your mind—that part that says: I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the grass is actually purple today—comes to a sudden stop and you realise that the birthmark you’ve carried around for the past months is sort of, kind of, a threat to your physical being. It’s the weird moment in which life says: Dude, the grass is GREEN. It’s only purple in your mind. Now let’s cut all the bullshit, smell the cappuccino and deal with the facts.
    I remember seeing Mr. Jackman’s Instagram photos, not long after they surgically removed the skin cancer from his nose. He encouraged us to keep up with smearing all those protectors all over our bodies. Sunscreen with an s.p.f. of what-have-you. Use it!
    None of that matters when the doctor in front of you—in reach, but yet so bloody far away—tells you that whatever kind of skin abnormality you there and then have, no matter how much you’ve come to get acquainted to it, no matter how many people you’ve convinced—not in the least yourself—that it has always in a way just been there (such a lie) and that it in no way forms a threat to anyone; it somehow resembles cancer and it needs to be surgically removed. Just to be sure.
   Not that I mind having pieces of my nose being chopped off. Hell, I’ve got plenty of nose. I would gladly donate inches of it to science— not only to investigate the scene of the crime—to find a proper cure and detection method for the stay-at-home-dads, who appear to catch a little too much of the powers of the Ra-Sun.
     Come to think of it, I would gladly chop off the third finger of my right hand if necessary. As long as it fits the road to a saver we-all-live-under-the-frying-rays-of-that-bloody-sun life. And let me tell you: it all looks swell on Mr. Jackman.
     And now that some minor words—skin… cancer…—have catapulted me from purple grass to green grass in a split second, I—in an instant—am forced to realize I am not Hugh Jackman. I am not the body-double for his arm-pit-hair-flailing-in-the-breeze. I do not resemble with my obvious five-years-ago-when-all-was-swell body his even more obvious twenty-years-ago-when-you-were-even-more-fantastic-than-you-are-today body. I am not Hugh Jackman! I cannot even copy his accent. And a freakishly shared skin-cancer does not make us brothers-in-whatever-kind-of-hell.
    We differ too much. [...]



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