| better words . . . . here there and everywhere |
Once I start, it's hard to stop. I've said it before and it's true- taking the 'higher' ground is overrated. None of you notice, nor do any of you follow suit. How is it that I, the one who was most affected and victimized by your sneers and ridicule, ever mustered up the courage to try to see beyond it, to try to accept it all and move past it? Why was it left to me to try to fix it all, when none of you put an ounce of effort into it at all? I tried so fucking hard, every time one of you made some inappropriate, cutting jab at me. But none of you really care. All of your games, your silly childish games... that's what your lives are now. And you all fucking know it. And YOU, you think I forget the words you spoke to me on the phone six years ago? We mutually pretend that it was just her and a few of them that ever called me "sleazy". But we both know that's not true. Do you remember that phone conversation? The one where YOU told me it was all sleazy and gross, and that what T & J had (as opposed to what I had with T) was pure and right? Do you remember that? YOU said the sex they had was meaningful and as far from sleaze as humanly possible, that what I was doing was cheap, second-rate and ridiculous, however. I was silent and then said "fine" and I hung up the phone. You knew I was in love with him and you wanted your words to twist inside me, to destroy me. You said "It was different with T & J... what they had meant something" I never forgot that, ever. And do you remember when C went back to France in order to get his things together so he could move back here? You, again, were on the phone with me, telling me all about how fun it was living with J and about the skimpy pyjamas she wore that left nothing to the imagination. How you felt attracted to her and how you didn't know if J would be able to wait the few weeks/months until C got back, how she was "the kind of person" who needed to be with people and have sex with them. In your soft, concerned voice you said "And I could never judge her for that. That's who she is, she has needs" and you wondered out loud if she would seek you out. I nearly gagged on the phone that night, listening to you talk about her as though she were some nimble, forest sprite who needed to enchant men, seduce them, in order for her "free spirit" to thrive. When the real truth is she's got the biggest, darkest hole inside her and that the only time she feels anything is when she's got some guy in her thrall. Yeah, very poetic. And what about the time she got us all to leave T's apartment for two weeks under the impression that he was sick of us? Wasn't that a clever ploy? You know what she did? She came over EVERY day to T's apartment so SHE could be with him,alone and uninterrupted, and perhaps lead him to believe that she was somehow special. I suppose she was feeling outshined and unneeded, what with the charm and real grace of someone like A being there, she must have felt threatened. And it was a neat trick that all of you guys pulled up there, two floors above me and T. Starting rumours that me, T and G were starting our own "collective", how we were all having sex together. I loved how you combined the absurd with the grotesque... really goes to show how highly you thought of all of us. Oh, and then YOU, you casually tell me that I've ruined J's supposed friendship with T, because apparently I'm fucking him all the time or have my hands down his pants. Yeah, right. With twenty people in the living room and french exchange students watching Monty Python, yeah, that gets me hot and bothered. And it was really rich of you to accuse me of that when you couldn't keep your hands off of a certain exchange student yourself. But that's different, you probably tell yourself... because it's meaningful and not the least bit trashy. Yeah, right. So, what did you do, the three of you, upstairs? Would you start off by telling J about my latest problem? Then, would she roll her eyes and begin a diatribe on how sad and dramatic I was, how pathetic I was? I hope it was fun. I hope someone was having fun. You know, if it was anyone else, you would agree with me. When we were having problems with L in highschool, you didn't give her an inch, didn't make excuses for her. But since it's J we're dealing with, someone you once (or still do, maybe?) wanted to stick your dick into, everything gets brushed away as a misunderstanding. Yeah, she's so mysterious and enigmatic. Is it the boyish figure, her vacuous mind, her faux-melancholy act? "Oh, no one can possibly understand her!" I never should have wasted one minute trying to defend myself. I was always defending myself back then... against her phantom accusations, the suggestions she would let fall from her lips. the stuff you just ate up and swallowed as though she were speaking grand truths. You once told me how "wise" she was. It was then that I knew how naive you were. I was in love with T. I was in love for the very first time, something that never happens again, something monumental. And all of you had to shit all over it, knowing that all you were doing was messing with my head. And when I thought I was going to leave T for good because I couldn't take the heartbreak any more, do you know what you did? You never once asked me how I was feeling, or if I was hurt. All you did was accuse me of doing a shitty thing to T. You said "He really doesn't deserve this". And you knew that he did, in fact, deserve it. He even knew and knows that he deserved it. But you see what you want to see, and all of you hated that I was no longer the funny fat girl in the group. I had traded up and it made all of you nervous. Who was I to actually be anything more than an accessory to this group? You were all thrown by that, weren't you? I remember everything. Every fucking detail. And there's more, and maybe I'll write the whole thing out. I've got that letter that I never sent to any of you, still on my desktop. I could copy and paste and let the whole thing ooze out, pus and blood and shit. And I find it so fucking ironic that once again, in some way, I'm being told that people are only "pretending" to be friends with me. You know how much I hate that burn, which is, I suppose, why you've done it. I'm sure you think I spend my days holed in the apartment, wasting time on the computer, shutting myself off from life. But the truth is I don't tell any of you what I do with my time. After all, I wouldn't have the pleasure of getting asked on a frequent basis "Gee, aren't you bored?" by whomever you've told my fake life to. I love it, I really do. I'm such a simple, one-dimensional character in your book, eh? I like it that way too, otherwise the whole thing would be too complex and you wouldn't know where to fit me in, right? I make it really simple for you and your "friends". You should be thanking me for that, really. This is it. I'm through. I might fill in a few blanks here and there, well, because I don't want you inventing any more lies about me. I'm sick of people fictionalizing my life so that they can feel superior. I will dot my "i's" and cross my "t's" and be out of here soon enough. And if you feel the urge, something primitive within you that beckons you to gape over the corpse of this diary like a fresh kill and enjoy it, feel free to pass the link around to anyone who might get a good laugh at my expense. Because it isn't my corpse, it's yours, and you've done it all to yourself. I didn't lose you yesterday. I lost you six years ago. You're just a shadow, a shell of something that never was. |
better places . . . . over under and through |