A Man Among Men

Funny, how my mind plays tricks on me, insisting he was a giant. A legend. A gladiator. And funny how sifting through the blending sea of faces none are familiar. In a cosmic twist of irony I realize these men are interchangeable. Almost unbelievably any one of these men could be mistaken for the one I sought. He seems so much bigger in my mind's eye. Unmistakable. Room commanding.
             And yet I could have looked in him the eyes the second I arrived and still not have guessed his identity. In my memory he is a single forbidding figure, larger than life, with an unholy growl and the flashing, knowing eyes of a predator. In this room, he is only a man among men.
             I aim my Polaroid with the precision of a hunter. Point, click, point click. Taking indecent satisfaction in being so close to omnipotency, freezing a succession of subjects and casually tucking them into my pocket, forever captured in the midst of whatever mundane thing they were saying or doing. And then finally, heart-stoppingly, my lens lands on him and a wave of fury rolls over me. I snap the photo accidentally, and my camera whirs to life, beginning to process and print this new input of data. Jerking the film out before it was fully ejected, I stop and stare at it. The film, incapable of lies, shows him as my eyes did. My camera drops, and the strap wrenches against my neck feeling suspiciously like a noose.
             I'm here! I want to shout. I grew up, I've come to challenge you and win at last.
             But my memory does him little justice. The giant of my childhood has already been bested.                                

                        Robbed of sight and fight by age. 
                        I am here! I mentally beckon him. I've come at last, throw off your guise of rheumy eyes and arthritic limbs. Come fight me!
                        But he has long-since been thieved of his ego, his personality, the ability to rewind the years for hours at a time. He has been beaten, watered down until there is nothing to arouse neither like nor dislike. I turn away, disgusted. This toothless dog is not what I was expecting.                   

                        He is feeble. Brittle and dry, his arms permanently curled in from disuse. Stripped of his villainous role, from his humanity, and pride in one fleeting, and yet seemingly endless, moment.
                        My mind has allowed him to live, unhindered by time and disease, flash-frozen at the peak of his prime. Levered onto a pedestal where he parades his youth's glory like a royal robe and crown. 
                       But he is now nothing. And I never was anything.
                      So we are at last equal.