Well I Don't See No Holes In The Road But You.

My eyes have been opened today. Would you like to see how?

This will be a good one for all you early blog readers. Remember how smitten I was about a certain boy? Remember how heartbroken I was when it didn’t turn out how I thought? Well, walk with me through the things you don’t remember.

The first time I thought there might be something between us was when a friend, we’ll call her the Girl for identity purposes, called me to tell me that boy had texted her. I was in Ho Ho Gourmet with my mother’s family. Why did I care? She went on to apologize about how this had worked out: he wasn’t supposed to be texting her, he was supposed to be texting me. Of course, I suddenly felt, in my core, betrayed. Well, ends up—according to that Girl’s claims—he was asking her if I liked him. I took that as a dashing sign. Just goes to show how elementary I still am. Er… was. Hopefully.

Well, I went home to this news and ran upstairs in a flurry. Of course that meant he loved me. Duh.

For the next hour I heard second hand all the things he was saying. She was the messenger. For an hour. Then finally my number was given to him and he and I actually texted. Best night ever, I thought.

Embarrassment still burns like it’s fresh.

So on went the days, and occasionally she’d say what he’d said, sending me forwards of his response to various things in their conversations. About me. Oh gross, I’m an idiot.

Everything I did with him, with the exception of a certain extracurricular we shared, she was some way a part of. But come on, she was my best friend, right?

Occasionally my mind replays the image of her forwarded text (in response to if he liked me) saying he was “indifferent, but beginning to notice”, and the way his eyes looked that one date we had when he placed his hand on my thigh and I blabbered like an idiot, and the look in those same eyes when he told me the thing I’d just overheard about him and another girl would be “our little secret.” And I wonder why. Why did I read it like it was good? Why did he put his hand there? Was it just because he was going through the motions, because he actually felt something, because he knew I’d feel something, or because he knew how I felt and wanted to see if he could get himself to feel the same? Why?

And it’s all been of late I’ve been analyzing his actions, so stuck I am in the rhythm of interpreting written dialogue and stage movement for the play. It’s been so recent that I’ve been trying to unearth the mystique behind the whole “affair”. And today I found the vast majority of it, and it wasn’t even where I expected.

A grand chum of mine was discussing that Girl with me today, going on about her grievances regarding her friendship with said Girl. I’ve come to realize (far too late, I’m afraid) that this (as Lexi calls her) “toxic friend” is only weather-able for a year or so. No more. My chum has found she’s struggling with six months. She was saying how that Girl keeps pinning for that which my chum has, and then she said simply, almost more joking than serious:

“It’s like she’s living vicariously through me.”

Metaphorically, I staggered into the wall.

“It’s like she’s living vicariously through me.”

It’s like she’s living vicariously through me.

And I threw down my pick-axe and jumped on the mound of freshly turned dirt and screamed.
I’d figured it out. And I feel so, so sick inside. I feel so… used.

It’s the first time I’ve felt so. And it’s the first time feeling so could have been so accurate.

I never read straight from that boy his opinion of me. When we went on that date it was a double with that Girl, and apparently she’d been texting him in the time leading up to us picking him up. Everything he did seemed somehow not… real. And it wasn’t my being in ecstasy that distorted the impression I received. I’d assumed it was him striving to be a gentlemanly date. Or was it something she… Oh, what a fool I’d been!!!!! I honestly cannot find words adequate to express this swirling pound of emotion. The RAT! How dare she; but alas I get ahead of myself.

I found a few months ago (as alluded to in my Opportunity Train post), that my knowledge of right and wrong doesn’t exist with her. All of last year, and that one day we hung out two months ago, whatever I set in my head I wouldn’t do, I’d do. If she said it was logical. I’m remembering now hundreds of things I’ve said or done that were logical because she took my desperate belief of Fate and warped it into her own sick meaning. Fate is not God given, oh no. Oh no. Fate is the idiotic illusion that things will work out; Fate is something she says that you moronically believe will come to pass and YOU ARE WRONG. You are heart-wrenchingly WRONG. And you scramble in grief for months, and you find something better and she gnaws her claws again into you sinews and tells you which way to move, for Fate has scripted it, and you follow, and you break what you had yet again. And you lose what you had yet again.

And why? WHY? Because she has no ability to find happiness of your caliber anywhere herself. She’s too fake, too outgoing, too “friendly” in the most immature and grotesque way that no one in their right mind except for God himself would care give her a second glance in the category of love, and only because God loves all his children. Only because God is God. Everyone who’s met her doesn’t care for her that way, but you, oh you, idiotic girl! You let her in the gates of friendship and she left through the melted, distorted, grated remains of your heart. You. Had. All. She. Had. Not. You were all she wasn’t; all she could never be, and “God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay[!!!] That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.”*

But it’s not “friendship” the leech wants. It’s not “friendship” the reason she’s meddling in your clay.

She’s living vicariously through you.

That boy was never mine. Perhaps he could have been. Perhaps, if I hadn’t sat where I sat in choir, if I hadn’t gone from class to class with her, if I hadn’t felt she’d be my ticket to actually making friends in high school, perhaps it would have been different. Perhaps he would have liked me for me, instead of all heaven knows she told him of me; perhaps he would have cared not to trample my heart by at least staying my friend instead of asking her at our day activity if he could do something with her sometime. And perhaps the boy that followed him, the one who truly seemed to like me, and the one I, truly, liked back, perhaps we would be somewhere now. Or at least would have had something better to write in each other’s yearbooks than the “dan”ce. And why? Why did things fray? Why did the ribbon of my splendid life need to be pruned and re-stitched?

It was her.

And I pray you learn from my mistake, I pray you ignore that she’s your acquaintance and ignore her presence in your life, I pray you don’t room with her in college, I pray she somehow starts to take your sense of humor as complete and utter hatred toward her and grows to hate you too. Because then, like me, you won’t have to deal with her, other than the occasional rant she mutters about you literally behind your back, and other than the meager twang of guilty fakeness you feel when you pretend to smile at her, because she’s pretending to smile back.

And I pray you've guessed who she is, because honestly, and I say this with a pinch of regret only because I try not to say such comments, I hate her as much as she hates me.

And I’ll die before ever including her in my affairs again.



*my personal favorite book quote from Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (exclamation points are my own doing.)