When You Can’t Beat Him. Join Him.

A Tale of Material Balance and Other Forms of Sorcery.

In those humid university days when the moon hovered too close to the earth and the dormitory lights hummed like restless ancestors, I lived with a man who could bend the order of things. My roommate — tall, luminous, and immune to embarrassment — had the peculiar gift of summoning women as rain summons thunder. They came in clusters and laughter, trailing perfume and prophecy. When they crossed our threshold, their eyes bypassed me as though I were made of air, and fell instead upon him — the favored son of the gods of equilibrium.

Do not mistake me: I was not jealous. Not then. My feeling was of another order — something like awe mixed with the slow ache of inadequacy, the kind that colonizes a man quietly, whispering that brilliance is always imported. My roommate was a student of Chemical Engineering, a disciple of the science of order — a priest who worshiped at the altar of balance. I, a mere dreamer, studied the softer sorceries: literature, history, the politics of ghosts.

But one night, when he went out in pursuit of another conquest, I heard a whisper — faint and ancestral — telling me to trespass upon his kingdom. I sat on his bed, which smelled faintly of musk and triumph, and opened his books as though they were relics from a civilization not my own. Material and Energy Balance. Thermodynamics of Reaction Systems. These titles shimmered before me like foreign gods whose power could neither be resisted nor understood.

“If you cannot beat the man,” I murmured, “join him — if only through imitation.”

I read without comprehension, yet something ancient stirred in me. It was as if I had found the lost scrolls of a forgotten empire, the blueprints of a world that ran not on justice but on the arithmetic of control. The ink rearranged itself as I stared: equations became incantations, symbols became sigils, and the law of conservation of energy became a parable about power — that nothing in the world is ever truly lost, only transferred.

When he returned, I asked him questions in a tone of reverence. “Why does matter seek balance?” I asked. “Why not glory?” He laughed, pleased, not knowing that each answer I drew from him was a stolen ember. Slowly, I learned his language — the dialect of systems, the cadence of certainties. He grew prouder; I grew hungrier.

Soon, I began to perform his brilliance for the women who came. I walked them through our room as though through a shrine, naming his textbooks as if they were relics of my own making. “This,” I would say, tapping the spine of Unit Operations, “teaches the logic of the unseen — how vapor becomes liquid and back again.” The women smiled in that way that makes even fraudulence feel holy.

But there was one — one who saw through the smoke. She was clever and quiet, the kind of woman whose gaze turns pretense into confession. “Tell me,” she asked, “what is the point of all this balance?”

Her question struck like a spear. I did not know the answer. I only knew that I wanted her to believe I did. So I studied again — in secret, in desperation — until the equations opened like oracles. I discovered that what the engineers called balance was merely the old law of the world: that all things must return what they take. Food, water, power, love — every input must find its output.

When next she came, I explained it as though I had written it in fire. “If all that enters leaves, the body dies. If all that enters stays, the body swells and bursts. Between these two deaths lies life — the delicate conspiracy of keeping and letting go.”

She leaned closer, her eyes soft with revelation. “And you,” she said, “can tell who is balanced?”

“Yes,” I whispered, “I can tell. Just by looking. You are perfect equilibrium.”

Her smile was the kind that undoes empires. For in that moment, I realized that what I sought in her gaze was not romance but recognition — the same hunger that drives nations to mimic empires, to copy their sciences and borrow their gods, hoping to be seen as equals.

Years later, I would understand the sorcery at work. That room was not just a room — it was the laboratory of mimicry. I was the colonized apprentice, learning to speak in the syntax of power. My roommate was the empire, his charm the illusion of mastery. And the girl — she was Africa herself, restless, testing whether imitation could ever birth authenticity.

What I learned then — in that half-lit room thick with perfume and pretense — is that mimicry is not theft but transformation, and sometimes corruption. You sit on another man’s bed, open his books, and try to summon his magic. But in doing so, you summon your own ghost — the one that remembers who you were before the imitation began.

When you can’t beat the man, you join him. But beware: if you join him long enough, the mirror forgets its maker. One morning you will look up and find that his face has replaced yours, his voice now echoing where your own once spoke. You will have become the shadow that mistook itself for the body — the imitation that survived by erasing its source.