lifethatyouhate
Crouching down, words hovering above me. Lectures about everything I'm doing and not doing and what you want me to do and what you want me not to do. Lectures from you and everyone else, towering over me every second to make sure it's only ever what you need. If I were to leave and stand in the field, everything at my level, I wouldn't know what the hell to do.
I don't know what the hell to do.
Is that why I go back to you?
It was my first time camping, and I was given the amazing privilege of exploring on my own. My twelve year old mind was flying with the possibilities this entailed. I discovered my own private little island, with white butterflies everywhere. They landed all over me, and I closed my eyes and felt that my life had been so full of joy, it was unbearable.
I returned last year, standing on the other side of the little creek that isolated that tiny patch of land. Had it always been that small? Had it always been so close to camp? The butterflies were gone. I perched myself on a rock and watched the water flow to the west, thinking that my life had been full of so much pain, it was unbearable.
I was always looking for the whys of the world; why was I born into this turmoil, why didn't I fit in with the others, why was everything so much harder for me? People went through their social interactions with ease, breezed past me with far more elegance than I would ever have. I never understood what was different about me until I met the person who could say with that same ease that I was not different, just unique, that I was not disliked, just unknown. The world had answers, the world has hope. I have no better answers than the ones I deduced on my own, but I have renewed hope.
The rubber band snaps back, always dependable, and I am left to my own amusement. I snap it endlessly; it pounds against my wrist, leaves its mark. This useless elastic band is making more of a mark than I am, though it will fade away in moments. I sit in a crowded room completely alone and wonder who would notice if I slipped away? Who would notice if I did not even return? Who would notice if I were absent? It's a tough question, I try not to think of it. I listen to the snapping again, but now that my mind has reached this though, nothing else can be reached.
There are always promises. Promises to be there, promises I believed in. Always. Lightning flashes briefly and illuminates the night, but if you're not looking it's the thunder that tells you it's there. I wasn't looking, I didn't see until the sound rang in my hears. White noise, static, as expected. Who was I to know what was and what wasn't there? I closed my eyes and took deep breaths and everything was silent as I shoved my face beneath the water. Dare I, don't I? Not tonight. My life is much too short, much too long, to throw away even for you. Even for me. Even for us.
He wrote on the board that a mole was 6.02x10 to the 23rd power. I didn't care. I never did. Wasn't that why I had taken a seat in the back of the room? No, it had been to sit behind him. And how had my priorities changed throughout the year that I stopped watching the boy directly in front of me, and started paying more attention to the antics of the boy all the way in the front row? I remember watching as he wrote that on the board, staring at my reflection in the cabinets to my right. I could watch the whole class unfold from that spot, but it was impossible to watch that one boy from there. I had to turn my head to the front. I remember he was looking back too, on that one day- the introduction to this unit. And he looked away right after, but I looked down at my paper and genuinely tried, and thought that maybe my secret feelings weren't utterly stupid.
I was always the one people called when they were crying. It was always a mystery to me, for I'm not particularly warm, or bright, and I never have good advice at hand. But so it happened. Males and females, friends and frenemies, calling in the afternoon or the middle of the night sobbing and pleading for me to console them. And I did. And maybe I was never very good at it. But there were times when I wanted to be. Never more so than today. Though I may be awkward, cold, and uninviting, I try. And I'll try. For you, at least.
"We're a crew," he promised, extended his pinky to me. "Me, you, and all our friends. A crew. Remember when we learned that word? Crew."
We linked pinkies and shook, but I knew it wouldn't last and he knew he didn't mean it. We were at the end of elementary school, on the brink of middle school. Pinky promises meant everything. Pinky promises meant nothing. We were never a real crew, and we never stayed one. We were always two separate people, meant to pass each other silently in high school. Our promise has faded, along with our childhood friendship, and I've been left in the shadows of our hopeful crew.
Her birth was a moment I had waited for with annoyance for hours with a group of five who couldn't stand each other. They left me, too young, waiting alone in the floor below the birthing level. It was quiet, that night, and you could hear the muffled sounds of new mothers screaming, could hear the whirring of machines in offices, the sound of a bed being rolled down the hall. Hospitals did not scare me; rather, they calmed me. I sat alone until I was allowed to see this child, the child I had promised I would hate. I fell in love with her that instant, and when her father and I made eye contact, we both burst into tears.
I waver on the simplest decisions and stand strong on the toughest. It is the way I always was. The questions that should have confused me or led me astray at some point, any point, are the ones which have always prompted me to hold my beliefs safe and firm. The easiest things, the choices people made in an instant on a day to day basis, take me hours. I was- am- self-assured enough to trust my heart when it counts, but too much of a coward to rely on what I want for life's simplest pleasures.
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