Superiority, insecurity and insensitivity. All of these would lead to naivety, ADD and manipulation.
I remember her as a person, not as a girl or a name. Someone with a changing character, a deep personality, and a sense of humor no imagination could possibly replicate. She wasn't outstanding, but she was definitely not normal in any sense, from her dark brown eyes to her heavily scarred legs; she was simply one-of-a-kind.
And I had seen her as a sister I always wished I had had.
When you begin to make realizations like that, everything becomes incredibly awkward. And in this case, it did.
I tried. I tried to be cool, and nice and amazing—I tried to be a brother. But 14 years of being one really hadn’t given me any real experience at all. I became different people: exciting, but matter-of-fact; hyperactive, but gentle; harsh, but vulnerable; a friend, but someone more. By the end, I had forgotten who I was. And I had long-since forgotten who I had originally seen her as.
She pushed me away, with disgust and annoyance at whatever effort I made. I don’t blame her for it. Wouldn’t anybody, when some creepy kid, two years older than you, began acting strangely? I would too. In fact, I would’ve gotten a baseball bat for protection.
Desperately, I managed to excite her into an accountability “contract”. It was futile. And I knew it. But rather than sustain a dwindling friendship, I decided to break it abruptly. I broke the “contract” and gave her a cold shoulder for the rest of the school year.
Obviously I haven’t had enough friends to know from the start, to know that this was such a bad idea.
I didn’t care what she thought, what she felt, or what she wanted. She wasn’t important; it was my thoughts and desires that were priority, that changed the storyline of my life. After all, wasn’t I the main character?
It’s thoughts like those that really reveal who you are. Unfortunately, there are relatively few things that can let you realize it. Luckily, one of them is a raging friend.
“What the hell?!” he wrote. Even though it was a chat, I cringed. I knew he was restraining himself from saying harsher and more meaningful words. Ouch. The Internet didn’t stifle the power of writing at all; with all the emoticons, I thought it made it more powerful. Especially since I had a chatbox full of symbols that eventually showed a large middle finger. Well I had to give him points for creativity. I never thought brackets could be used like that.
Skipping all profanity, his statement was pretty much: “Stop making a jackass of yourself. Cool off.”
If I had known it was that simple, I could have saved an hour of watching chat messages expand on my monitor.
But by the time I decided to follow his advice, it was already over.
And now I wonder, which stage of loss am I in right now?
Denial, probably. After all, isn't replacement a type of denial?
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