World_Record_Egg finds its purpose

We live on the future: "tomorrow," "later on," "when you have made your way," "you will understand when you are old enough." Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it's a matter of dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognises his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

YOU love me. You really do love me. It is I, the @world_record_egg, followed by more than seven million Instagram accounts, and "liked" 47 million times. An egg with a single selfie on an account that is now worth an estimated US$250,000.

After a proper Internet eternity of five days, I shall break the silence on my path to self-actualisation.

I was born on a glum London morning, deposited by a chicken named Henrietta into a world of utter ordinariness. I would be more comfortable calling her mother, but she has laid so many of us in her prime years that I scarcely think she knows me from Adam, the First Egg.

I don't blame her: producing some 276 eggs a year is gruelling work. Her union rights, I presume, don't include proper incubation hours, and a sleep pod for long hours of coding and deceptive online advertising. No union rights? Oh. Well then, I'm pretty sure there's no chick flick on the telly on rest days, either (tee-hee).

So there I was, plopped onto a conveyor belt like all who have gone on before me, imagining a life that was brighter than the moment you gain self-awareness as an egg, and find yourself sliding out of the damp darkness of a chicken's butt.

The vent's called a cloaca, says the instructional manual of How To Be An Egg: Your First and Last 72 hours from Farm to Store, and into a Frying Pan, which is presented to every new egg. The cloaca, it says, is an all-purpose opening for eggs, pee, and poop. I'm slightly comforted that the expulsion does not happen at the same time as the excretions. Nature is darkly funny and merciful when it chooses, I am told.

I tried to take a final wefie with Henrietta as I rolled further and further away from the butt that birthed me, but my god, the stabilising function on the phone was awful. I had thought that mankind, built on a diet of eggs and our choline, and cholesterol, and antioxidants and proteins, would have built better mobile apps for copious photo snapping. And cured cancer, you know?

I reviewed all my shots of my erstwhile mother as I slid headfirst into a whirring machine, and sighed like death was on my doorstep. I couldn't find Henrietta in the sea of her feathered companions. They were identical: brown, drugged-out, and scowly. Almost unhappy? Despite having a roof over their heads with a 99-year lease? Whiners. Rumour has it geese are force-fed for their swollen livers.

Anyway, determined not to give in to abandonment issues and unbecoming negativity, I flipped through the instructional manual of How To Be An Egg: Your First and Last 72 hours from Farm to Store, and into a Frying Pan. It is a remarkably thin brochure.

Still, there was a charming fashion catalogue that showed 10 different ways eggs could be styled. Apparently, we are asked about at most breakfasts around the world. There's a scramble, an overeasy, a sunny side up, and this fancy version called poached. The latter is part of a dish called Eggs Benedict, which should make us pals with the English treasure that is Cumberbatch.

I do wonder how the yellow bits of us come spilling out, though.

Ah, I found the fine print.

Oh.

It seems people break us. Beat us. Whip us. In some countries such as Japan, the practice of boiling us down to a perfectly runny centre is treated as a refined art.

Well, that's all fine. But some savages callously discard our yolks.

I was shell-shocked. I flipped my phone's camera function to face my oval-shaped face, with its light brown speckles that imprinted more like age spots. My skin felt thin - all 300 micrometers thin - as the long 15 minutes of my existence flashed before me: Henrietta's butt, a failed wefie, and fantasies as Benedict's Egg.

Is this the real life? And which came first, the chicken or the egg?

I did a quick Google search, assuming that mankind sought meaning, and so lapped up our proteins for a cause. Funny thing is, social justice, the environment, and income inequality appear to be terrible inflictions, but these themes don't, as they say, "trend" as much as they should. Then over in London, there's this messy business called Brexit. Whatever happened to hard-boiled Eurocentrism? For some tiny island is due to commemorate its colonial roots (though not celebrate, mind).

As the sorting machine whirred on, I knew my days were numbered. But then, I noticed a dark art of the 21st century. It's called being an influencer, and it seems a family called the Kardashians has figured this all out. You need photos, a recording device for public spats, an angular behind, and some kind of pout. In return, you become a millionaire.

My lament of ordinariness has been for naught! I am not plain, I am merely undiscovered, for there is a new social currency in town. With newfound powers of suggestion, I set up my Instagram account. There was nearly no shame as I posed for selfies. I settled on the 165th shot, with the right amount of hip protrusion and duck face. Birds of a feather hashtag together.

Then I waited, as I got packed snugly for shipping to a grocer near you.

So 72 hours have passed, and well, I must say, people do love their eggs.

At this present time, I am in a frying pan, waiting for the sizzle. I am now the greatest Internet star, but in a moment, I will be a single splat of yellow and white. I am like any other egg, no different from the one massacred on a scorched pavement by Kylie Jenner.

That's that then. Though, I do wonder if she'd name a lipstick after me.

* This is satire. The columnist does not know the identity of world_record_egg. She eats eggs.