Thank you, Vikki.
Thank you for being my wife, my therapist, my friend.
Thank you for listening so patiently to the details of my confused and fucked up life,thank you for listening and then making me laugh.
Thank you for not letting there be an awkward silence, like there usually is, when you mention death in a conversation.
Vikki, we are shared platters of pancakes in the late afternoon, we are long evenings sitting by the river or in our bandstands.
We are the smell of hairdye and chinese food and free periods in college spent walking all the way to your house to watch five minutes of a film before walking back again.
We are pages and pages of doodles across my school notes and Triple Ace Tattoo Studio and sleepovers spent watching scary as fuck horror films.
We are hours at Pinners and in the geography room and in the park.
We are conversations without an end.
Love you lots. Miss you lots.
Monday 13 February 2012
Saturday 11 February 2012
Furthur proof that I have very little of a life...
My third blog post in less than twenty four hours....what is this witchcraft?
In less than 5 hours, I will be home with my lovely family, and my wonderful and much missed best friend. I'm so buzzed about going home; chances are, by the end of the week, I will be equally buzzed about being back at Warwick, so it all works out.
Last night, I dreamt....many strange things, and part of it was a memory of a tableux from when I was about....fifteen, perhaps? Maybe sixteen?
It was a saturday afternoon, outside the Superdrug in town, in the space so charmingly named Pidgeon Square, due to the fact that the square (much like the rest of bedford) is populated in big, scary, vicious pidgeons, than will happily claw your face off, should you give them a fair chance.
There was a small crowd watching a choir of children from (Please forgive my generalisation) Africa, all of whom were orphans, all of whom came from the streets, all of whom were very talented and absolutely adorable: their singing was interspersed by their high, hopeful voices reciting about how they wanted to be doctors and lawyers and bus drivers when they grew up, and I swear, just to hear them was enough to make you (by which i mean me) cry, and the day before, they'd performed at a school assembly.
I'd enjoyed it so much, I was watching them again, and was (inevitably) approached from a stock character from the Play Of My Life- the random weirdo. To be fair, this man was fairly clean, and fairly articulate, and didnt seen to have any plans to abduct and/or rape me in the alley behind Woolworths (always a good thing), so I wasn't too freaked out.
I don't remember much of what he said, but I do remember he quite fixated with making me see the error of my ways and embrace the miracle of Yaweh (sorry....I meant God), and I was equally determined not to, but quite content to argue with him for a few minutes. I remember that his favourite arguemnt seemed to be the metaphor of a music concert- (I just had a horrible thought that he chose 'music concert' in order to 'relate' to my teenageness....fml....)- he said that if i didnt have a ticket, i wouldnt get in....so it was safer to get a ticket than to not.
I presume faith was the ticket....as if its so easy to 'choose' to believe something or not to beleieve.
In retrospect, I know what my answer should have been:
"If heaven is a concert, I doubt it'll play the kind of music i like. The people i like wont be there, if you have to be christian to get in: there will be.....hmm...maybe my grandparents and my evangelical cousins....but NO ONE ELSE! Not my mum, my dad, my brother, my aunts and uncles and cousins. My boyfriend wont be there, my friends wont be there....if you need faith to geti n, then NONE of them ,no matter how good they are, will get in! And HOW would that be a privilege or a reward or even fun? It sounds ghastly....so no, I dont want a ticket. Because never, in a million years, would i choose to go to this 'concert"
In less than 5 hours, I will be home with my lovely family, and my wonderful and much missed best friend. I'm so buzzed about going home; chances are, by the end of the week, I will be equally buzzed about being back at Warwick, so it all works out.
Last night, I dreamt....many strange things, and part of it was a memory of a tableux from when I was about....fifteen, perhaps? Maybe sixteen?
It was a saturday afternoon, outside the Superdrug in town, in the space so charmingly named Pidgeon Square, due to the fact that the square (much like the rest of bedford) is populated in big, scary, vicious pidgeons, than will happily claw your face off, should you give them a fair chance.
There was a small crowd watching a choir of children from (Please forgive my generalisation) Africa, all of whom were orphans, all of whom came from the streets, all of whom were very talented and absolutely adorable: their singing was interspersed by their high, hopeful voices reciting about how they wanted to be doctors and lawyers and bus drivers when they grew up, and I swear, just to hear them was enough to make you (by which i mean me) cry, and the day before, they'd performed at a school assembly.
I'd enjoyed it so much, I was watching them again, and was (inevitably) approached from a stock character from the Play Of My Life- the random weirdo. To be fair, this man was fairly clean, and fairly articulate, and didnt seen to have any plans to abduct and/or rape me in the alley behind Woolworths (always a good thing), so I wasn't too freaked out.
I don't remember much of what he said, but I do remember he quite fixated with making me see the error of my ways and embrace the miracle of Yaweh (sorry....I meant God), and I was equally determined not to, but quite content to argue with him for a few minutes. I remember that his favourite arguemnt seemed to be the metaphor of a music concert- (I just had a horrible thought that he chose 'music concert' in order to 'relate' to my teenageness....fml....)- he said that if i didnt have a ticket, i wouldnt get in....so it was safer to get a ticket than to not.
I presume faith was the ticket....as if its so easy to 'choose' to believe something or not to beleieve.
In retrospect, I know what my answer should have been:
"If heaven is a concert, I doubt it'll play the kind of music i like. The people i like wont be there, if you have to be christian to get in: there will be.....hmm...maybe my grandparents and my evangelical cousins....but NO ONE ELSE! Not my mum, my dad, my brother, my aunts and uncles and cousins. My boyfriend wont be there, my friends wont be there....if you need faith to geti n, then NONE of them ,no matter how good they are, will get in! And HOW would that be a privilege or a reward or even fun? It sounds ghastly....so no, I dont want a ticket. Because never, in a million years, would i choose to go to this 'concert"
Friday 10 February 2012
Futility
It's hard to control what your heart tells you to do, sometimes.
It can be the comments made in passing that catch like a barb, jerking questions to your lips that you cant ask: a passing mention of a years-old eatng disorder, forcing me to exercise every scrap of control i posess to hold back the words that were already bubbling up: "When? What happend? How did no one notice and what caused it and how did you get better?"
Most of all, i wanted to ask how: "How can you think even for a second that you are anything other than so beautiful as you are? And what can I do, right now, to stop you ever suffering from this ever again in your life, because it hurts me to think of you hurting, and I'd do anything in the world to prevent it."
But I couldn't. She didnt need my clumsily worded questions or my sympathy or anything i could offer in that moment: i was five years too late to do anything to help, but i was still compelled to do something....anything... I didn't, of course.
It was too late, but i wanted to help, just like i wanted to go back a couple of weeks to stop my friend being alone in the ambulance nad then in the hospital. Her off handedness was surprising, but even so, i wanted to extract the promise that if she ever, ever was planning to be in an ambulance alone again, she would call me, at any hour of any day or night, because i couldnt bare to think of her being alone like that.
But i didnt say that either, of course. There was nothing i could say.
So instead i sipped my tea and hugged them goodbye and wished for the hundreth time that i could protect everyone i loved from everything bad, forever and ever, amen.
It can be the comments made in passing that catch like a barb, jerking questions to your lips that you cant ask: a passing mention of a years-old eatng disorder, forcing me to exercise every scrap of control i posess to hold back the words that were already bubbling up: "When? What happend? How did no one notice and what caused it and how did you get better?"
Most of all, i wanted to ask how: "How can you think even for a second that you are anything other than so beautiful as you are? And what can I do, right now, to stop you ever suffering from this ever again in your life, because it hurts me to think of you hurting, and I'd do anything in the world to prevent it."
But I couldn't. She didnt need my clumsily worded questions or my sympathy or anything i could offer in that moment: i was five years too late to do anything to help, but i was still compelled to do something....anything... I didn't, of course.
It was too late, but i wanted to help, just like i wanted to go back a couple of weeks to stop my friend being alone in the ambulance nad then in the hospital. Her off handedness was surprising, but even so, i wanted to extract the promise that if she ever, ever was planning to be in an ambulance alone again, she would call me, at any hour of any day or night, because i couldnt bare to think of her being alone like that.
But i didnt say that either, of course. There was nothing i could say.
So instead i sipped my tea and hugged them goodbye and wished for the hundreth time that i could protect everyone i loved from everything bad, forever and ever, amen.
In which I witness the slaughter of Ibsen....
Not the best production I have ever seen, by any extent: it was so bad that Anna actually contemplated getting her phone out, the last person I would ever imagine being rude in a theatre, which really shows how utterly bad the adaption was. However, it provided my friends and I with the joy of tearing it to shreds amidst general hilarity, and I was again reminded of the simple truth, that bad plays are ususally more fun to talk about than good ones.
The mean streets of coventry eyed us warily, and for good reason: we were, after all, 3 warwick students, all talking loudly and conspicously about Paradise Lost (ah...the joy of being an english student!) and we're probably lucky to have gotton back to campus alive.
All in all, it was a lovely night with lovely people: my life was saved twice (i.e Katherine pulled me back from some on coming traffic, clearly an indicator that, if i havent yet got the hang of crossing roads, i am really not ready to be an adult), and i enjoyed the hilarity of an awkward-turtle moment in the taxi home: Katherine sadly said she was slacking, as her last essay mark was the lowest mark she'd gotton so far....right before i mentioned how relieved i was at getting my most recent mark back (three points lower than hers). I felt a little sorry for her because she genuinly seemed to feel bad about it, but it was also pretty funny, and i intend to remind her of it next time i accidentally insult her (um....again).
The mean streets of coventry eyed us warily, and for good reason: we were, after all, 3 warwick students, all talking loudly and conspicously about Paradise Lost (ah...the joy of being an english student!) and we're probably lucky to have gotton back to campus alive.
All in all, it was a lovely night with lovely people: my life was saved twice (i.e Katherine pulled me back from some on coming traffic, clearly an indicator that, if i havent yet got the hang of crossing roads, i am really not ready to be an adult), and i enjoyed the hilarity of an awkward-turtle moment in the taxi home: Katherine sadly said she was slacking, as her last essay mark was the lowest mark she'd gotton so far....right before i mentioned how relieved i was at getting my most recent mark back (three points lower than hers). I felt a little sorry for her because she genuinly seemed to feel bad about it, but it was also pretty funny, and i intend to remind her of it next time i accidentally insult her (um....again).
Sunday 22 January 2012
Continued
The night out was pleasent but also decidedly average. A fun night, but not much more fun than I've come to expect since coming to Warwick.
Which is perhaps an indicator of my good luck in regards to parties, and perhaps also an indicator of how I am coming to develope an entitlement complex.
The music selection was mediocre: no Busted, no S Club, nothing I particularly feel invokes the 90s, and they closed with Fix You by Coldplay- a song i like very much when i'm hurting, but less so when i'm dancing and drunk: it is something of a buzz-kill.
And, having thus established I really am incapable of going five seconds without critiscizing something (a sad day for my ego), I can go back to my old topic: my tie. My tie, that i wore nearly every day between the ages of 13 to 16, because i owned only one.
My upper school tie, that was, above everything else, a symbol of My New Start: i was there when we brought the tie at a uniform sale, i carried it home, as we walked the same route i would walk many times to school once it started, and dreamed of the future. My fantasys of upper school life were limited and cliqued, as all my fantasys tend to be: i saw myself walking to and from with three or four other girls, all of us carrying bags and blazers, in late-autumn sunlight, with a general air of euphoria surrounding us. There were others, but it is this fantasy which stands out the most vivdly in my memory, perahps because it, more than any other, encapsulated so perfectly what it was i wanted, and i am even more surprised because i did not mould the fantasy in the form of a day dream: it sprung, fully formed, into my mind, as if my brain had processed all my individual desires into a single image. Even now, it is full technicolour, as bright as that first day i imagined it, and it still haunts my imagination 6 years on: the longing i felt for it stills feels fresh in my mind.
In my fantasy, all the girls were dark haired: identicle and indistinguishable, we were clones of one another. I can happily say that this part of the dream no longer appeals to me: i have moved in the opposite direction. I admire my friends for their uniqueness: with my cherry-red hair, purple daisy-chain tattoo and piercings, i stand out a little from the crowd myself. I adore all that it unique, different, special: anything, in short, that is not the same.
But the fantasy is 6 years old: 6 years ago, blending in with the crowd was but a cherished dream, and I was accustomed to standing out, sick of being different and hated for my difference. I wanted friends who looked like me-....No, what i really wanted was to BE LIKE THEM, because i could see nothing good about myself. WHy would i choose friends who were like me when i did not like myself? Much better to change who i was- and, accordingly, in my fantasy, our hair is uniformly shiney and wavey, our shoes and bags are carbon copies, our features morph to match each others, and how happy i was that even in my own fantasy, i could not tell which girl i was meant to be. It didn't matter: all that mattered was that i was one of them.
In my dream, we talked and laughed: i had had enough of silence. In my dream, i am in the middle of the conversation: i had had enough of listening to the conversations of others, so often about me, and being unable to interupt to defend myself, i had had enough of being ignored.
In my dream, we were simply walking, but in my mind, i knew we were walking home from school, because it was the walk home from school that was the longest, the most boring, the walk on which i most often longed for distraction. The walk home from school had also been the settings for some of the most painful confrontations, the cruelest attacks, the ones that were hardest to forget, the ones that haunted me long after they were over.
In my dream, our shoes and clothes and bags were identicle and indistinguishable but also conspicous in that all were expensive. I did not know at the time, nor do i know now, where i expected i would acquire these new possesions: there was no money left. I had not been given any such items on my last 13 birthdays and christmases and had no reason to expect that some would magically appear on my 14th birthday.
All I knew was that i was tired of being The Girl Who Didn't Have.
The item varied, but no matter whether it was Nike trainers, cute earrings, a lunchbox, a playstation, a furby: I never had whatever it was, and what made it worse was that i wanted these things SOLELY because people laughed when i didn't have them. Now i have my own money, i find that online games bore me after half a second, i can never be botherd to put my lunch in anything more than foil, Nike trainers make you look like a bit of a douche and i constantly lose earrings, cute or not (and my best friend recently confided in me that her fchristmas-present furby genuinly terrified her when she recieved one as a child).... and so it is probably unlikely i felt very differently when i was 10 or 11 or 12.
Nevertheless: my ideal was the sort of clone-style friendship i now regard with deep suspicion, and general mockery, and i understand why completly.
Until i was about 16, all signs of individuality were met with negative reinforcement- threats, jokes, ostracization, name calling, occaisional acts of physical....violence and abuse are overly dramatic words, so I'll just say that being repeatedly pinched, kicked and pushed, and having stuff thrown at you, over a period of time, pretty much destroys any natural impulse to be different.
After that, the things that were previously responded to negativly were suddenly met with enthusiasm: my new friends telling me how they loved my style, envying me for being 'so clever' or being 'such an individual'. Insignificant as it sounds, every compliment and show of affection was balm to the years that came before.
But these are things that i notice in hindsight: i paid little notice to them 6 years ago because there was a much bigger point to my fantasy, that shrunk every other detail in comparisome. In the fantasy, i had friends- good friends. In the fantasy, they liked me for who i was and felt as lucky to have me as i felt to have them. In my fantasy, i was happy...and for me at that time, being really, truly happy felt like a fantasy indeed.
I never realised my fantasy: it went, like so many others, unfullfilled, and, like so many others, it will probably never be fullfilled in my lifetime.
I am lucky that it was never fullfilled, though.
I will never be the girl i am in that fantasy, for several reasons.
I will never walk to or from school again, and when i did, my friends and i never looked like that.
My hair will never go back to being brown: i predict it will stay cherry-red for a good while longer before i change it again.
I cant afford shoes and bags like that (student debt, anyone?) and if i could, i wouldnt choose that style for myself anymore.
In fact the only part of the fantasy that still attracts me is its most basic premise: unconditional, unbound friendship, but it isnt something i fantasize about any more.
After all....why fantasize about something that i already have?
Which is perhaps an indicator of my good luck in regards to parties, and perhaps also an indicator of how I am coming to develope an entitlement complex.
The music selection was mediocre: no Busted, no S Club, nothing I particularly feel invokes the 90s, and they closed with Fix You by Coldplay- a song i like very much when i'm hurting, but less so when i'm dancing and drunk: it is something of a buzz-kill.
And, having thus established I really am incapable of going five seconds without critiscizing something (a sad day for my ego), I can go back to my old topic: my tie. My tie, that i wore nearly every day between the ages of 13 to 16, because i owned only one.
My upper school tie, that was, above everything else, a symbol of My New Start: i was there when we brought the tie at a uniform sale, i carried it home, as we walked the same route i would walk many times to school once it started, and dreamed of the future. My fantasys of upper school life were limited and cliqued, as all my fantasys tend to be: i saw myself walking to and from with three or four other girls, all of us carrying bags and blazers, in late-autumn sunlight, with a general air of euphoria surrounding us. There were others, but it is this fantasy which stands out the most vivdly in my memory, perahps because it, more than any other, encapsulated so perfectly what it was i wanted, and i am even more surprised because i did not mould the fantasy in the form of a day dream: it sprung, fully formed, into my mind, as if my brain had processed all my individual desires into a single image. Even now, it is full technicolour, as bright as that first day i imagined it, and it still haunts my imagination 6 years on: the longing i felt for it stills feels fresh in my mind.
In my fantasy, all the girls were dark haired: identicle and indistinguishable, we were clones of one another. I can happily say that this part of the dream no longer appeals to me: i have moved in the opposite direction. I admire my friends for their uniqueness: with my cherry-red hair, purple daisy-chain tattoo and piercings, i stand out a little from the crowd myself. I adore all that it unique, different, special: anything, in short, that is not the same.
But the fantasy is 6 years old: 6 years ago, blending in with the crowd was but a cherished dream, and I was accustomed to standing out, sick of being different and hated for my difference. I wanted friends who looked like me-....No, what i really wanted was to BE LIKE THEM, because i could see nothing good about myself. WHy would i choose friends who were like me when i did not like myself? Much better to change who i was- and, accordingly, in my fantasy, our hair is uniformly shiney and wavey, our shoes and bags are carbon copies, our features morph to match each others, and how happy i was that even in my own fantasy, i could not tell which girl i was meant to be. It didn't matter: all that mattered was that i was one of them.
In my dream, we talked and laughed: i had had enough of silence. In my dream, i am in the middle of the conversation: i had had enough of listening to the conversations of others, so often about me, and being unable to interupt to defend myself, i had had enough of being ignored.
In my dream, we were simply walking, but in my mind, i knew we were walking home from school, because it was the walk home from school that was the longest, the most boring, the walk on which i most often longed for distraction. The walk home from school had also been the settings for some of the most painful confrontations, the cruelest attacks, the ones that were hardest to forget, the ones that haunted me long after they were over.
In my dream, our shoes and clothes and bags were identicle and indistinguishable but also conspicous in that all were expensive. I did not know at the time, nor do i know now, where i expected i would acquire these new possesions: there was no money left. I had not been given any such items on my last 13 birthdays and christmases and had no reason to expect that some would magically appear on my 14th birthday.
All I knew was that i was tired of being The Girl Who Didn't Have.
The item varied, but no matter whether it was Nike trainers, cute earrings, a lunchbox, a playstation, a furby: I never had whatever it was, and what made it worse was that i wanted these things SOLELY because people laughed when i didn't have them. Now i have my own money, i find that online games bore me after half a second, i can never be botherd to put my lunch in anything more than foil, Nike trainers make you look like a bit of a douche and i constantly lose earrings, cute or not (and my best friend recently confided in me that her fchristmas-present furby genuinly terrified her when she recieved one as a child).... and so it is probably unlikely i felt very differently when i was 10 or 11 or 12.
Nevertheless: my ideal was the sort of clone-style friendship i now regard with deep suspicion, and general mockery, and i understand why completly.
Until i was about 16, all signs of individuality were met with negative reinforcement- threats, jokes, ostracization, name calling, occaisional acts of physical....violence and abuse are overly dramatic words, so I'll just say that being repeatedly pinched, kicked and pushed, and having stuff thrown at you, over a period of time, pretty much destroys any natural impulse to be different.
After that, the things that were previously responded to negativly were suddenly met with enthusiasm: my new friends telling me how they loved my style, envying me for being 'so clever' or being 'such an individual'. Insignificant as it sounds, every compliment and show of affection was balm to the years that came before.
But these are things that i notice in hindsight: i paid little notice to them 6 years ago because there was a much bigger point to my fantasy, that shrunk every other detail in comparisome. In the fantasy, i had friends- good friends. In the fantasy, they liked me for who i was and felt as lucky to have me as i felt to have them. In my fantasy, i was happy...and for me at that time, being really, truly happy felt like a fantasy indeed.
I never realised my fantasy: it went, like so many others, unfullfilled, and, like so many others, it will probably never be fullfilled in my lifetime.
I am lucky that it was never fullfilled, though.
I will never be the girl i am in that fantasy, for several reasons.
I will never walk to or from school again, and when i did, my friends and i never looked like that.
My hair will never go back to being brown: i predict it will stay cherry-red for a good while longer before i change it again.
I cant afford shoes and bags like that (student debt, anyone?) and if i could, i wouldnt choose that style for myself anymore.
In fact the only part of the fantasy that still attracts me is its most basic premise: unconditional, unbound friendship, but it isnt something i fantasize about any more.
After all....why fantasize about something that i already have?
Saturday 21 January 2012
There is nothing like alcohol to make you reflect...
The first Skool Dayz of Term 2 (and I should say that it caused me physical pain to have to spell School as Skool), and a lazy saturday of accomplishing nothing much, after a wonderful night, watching a wondeful play with wonderful people last night.
The time it takes me to get ready provides ample time for reflection: today, as I reached for the hairspray and waved my newly painted nails in the air to dry, it struck me that i am using my-
(a break as my flatmates inexplicably knock on my door to check that i am ready, then shriek with surprise as i open my door. Seriously, girls....it's barely 9am. How are you drunk ALREADY?)
- that i am using my Upper school tie for my costume tonight.
It's a tie I've had for a long time. I first put it on as a chronically shy 13 year old, with tentative hopes that this school would be different.
I was wearing this tie on my first day of Year 9, when I got on the bus with butterflies in my stomach and a new bag, filled with new pens and perfectly-sharpend pencils, and I was wearing this tie when i was late on my first day and ran across the tennis courts to join the end of the line of new arrivals in my new school shoes, hoping no one was really noticing me.
In retrospect, I shouldve guessed that the less-than-perfect start was indicative of the future....
(And now i must leave: my flatmates have resumed shouting for me to join them for the ceremonial opening of the first bottle of vodka of the night. I will continue...later...)
The time it takes me to get ready provides ample time for reflection: today, as I reached for the hairspray and waved my newly painted nails in the air to dry, it struck me that i am using my-
(a break as my flatmates inexplicably knock on my door to check that i am ready, then shriek with surprise as i open my door. Seriously, girls....it's barely 9am. How are you drunk ALREADY?)
- that i am using my Upper school tie for my costume tonight.
It's a tie I've had for a long time. I first put it on as a chronically shy 13 year old, with tentative hopes that this school would be different.
I was wearing this tie on my first day of Year 9, when I got on the bus with butterflies in my stomach and a new bag, filled with new pens and perfectly-sharpend pencils, and I was wearing this tie when i was late on my first day and ran across the tennis courts to join the end of the line of new arrivals in my new school shoes, hoping no one was really noticing me.
In retrospect, I shouldve guessed that the less-than-perfect start was indicative of the future....
(And now i must leave: my flatmates have resumed shouting for me to join them for the ceremonial opening of the first bottle of vodka of the night. I will continue...later...)
Wednesday 18 January 2012
Just right
I get things wrong.
I don't say enough, do enough.
I say goodbye to a friend, then wonder, when i get home, why i didn't press a little harder when they say they're fine, because obviously that isn't true.
I agree with a friend about how we both think we're going to fail our degree's, and then walk away, feeling so happy with all the lovely positve things they've said to me, and then stop: why didn't i say those things to them? Why didn't i comfort them instead of letting them comfort me?
In short, i can be a self-centered douche at times, and i feel bad about this a lot, for all the times i've said too little or gotton it wrong.
Today, though, i think i can be happy that i got something right.
We're talking about a new friend of mine whom i've only recently started to talk to properly.
We're talking about a girl with the enthusiasm of a child- the purest form of high-on-life that most of us will spend our lives wishing we could regain.
A girl who makes her own jewlery and wears feathers in her hair and turns handstands in the halls of the dorm just because she can, and puts on voices and accents as easily as breathing.
A girl who overturns my own predjudices against religion through her own testimony, who gives me a new look at what faith can be and what it can mean, and makes me think over my own beliefs.
But also a girl who hides insecurities behind her bubbly front. A girl with worries and fears and problems, just like everyone else.
Mostly because people just don't get her. Narrow minded, grey minded, close minded people who cant see past their view of what is normal to appreaciate her vitality and warmth and energy.
It breaks my heart to see her close off her very essence of self because she is sick of their laughter, their comments and glances and bitchiness.
Like i said, i usually don't know what to say, but today...i got it just right when i told her what she needed to hear. Because i knew what she needed was not sympathy, not for me to know how it feels to be her, not even the assurance that our kitchen is her kitchen and my door is open to her always (beside, she knows that).
She needed, quite simply, to know what i knew already: that to be judged negativly by such people sucks....but how much worse to be liked by them? How much worse to be like by people so petty, so braindead, so unoriginal, so cruel? Better to be disliked, by far.
And i got through to her.
It was the sun coming up over the hills, the freeing of a butterfly: the wonderful feeling that she was coming back to herself, that i had helped do that, that i was leaving the world with a little more good in it than bad today, that somebody was feeling better becasue of me.
The feeling of having got it just right.
I don't say enough, do enough.
I say goodbye to a friend, then wonder, when i get home, why i didn't press a little harder when they say they're fine, because obviously that isn't true.
I agree with a friend about how we both think we're going to fail our degree's, and then walk away, feeling so happy with all the lovely positve things they've said to me, and then stop: why didn't i say those things to them? Why didn't i comfort them instead of letting them comfort me?
In short, i can be a self-centered douche at times, and i feel bad about this a lot, for all the times i've said too little or gotton it wrong.
Today, though, i think i can be happy that i got something right.
We're talking about a new friend of mine whom i've only recently started to talk to properly.
We're talking about a girl with the enthusiasm of a child- the purest form of high-on-life that most of us will spend our lives wishing we could regain.
A girl who makes her own jewlery and wears feathers in her hair and turns handstands in the halls of the dorm just because she can, and puts on voices and accents as easily as breathing.
A girl who overturns my own predjudices against religion through her own testimony, who gives me a new look at what faith can be and what it can mean, and makes me think over my own beliefs.
But also a girl who hides insecurities behind her bubbly front. A girl with worries and fears and problems, just like everyone else.
Mostly because people just don't get her. Narrow minded, grey minded, close minded people who cant see past their view of what is normal to appreaciate her vitality and warmth and energy.
It breaks my heart to see her close off her very essence of self because she is sick of their laughter, their comments and glances and bitchiness.
Like i said, i usually don't know what to say, but today...i got it just right when i told her what she needed to hear. Because i knew what she needed was not sympathy, not for me to know how it feels to be her, not even the assurance that our kitchen is her kitchen and my door is open to her always (beside, she knows that).
She needed, quite simply, to know what i knew already: that to be judged negativly by such people sucks....but how much worse to be liked by them? How much worse to be like by people so petty, so braindead, so unoriginal, so cruel? Better to be disliked, by far.
And i got through to her.
It was the sun coming up over the hills, the freeing of a butterfly: the wonderful feeling that she was coming back to herself, that i had helped do that, that i was leaving the world with a little more good in it than bad today, that somebody was feeling better becasue of me.
The feeling of having got it just right.
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