Post by Deleted on Nov 20, 2018 22:45:37 GMT
WHAT A WEARY TIME-- TO HAVE THE DESIRE TO LIVE BUT NOT THE ABILITY.  1997 - my earliest memory of Athena. We had known each other longer, but those earliest years are lost to me... we kissed because we saw people kissing on TV, and I remember how weird it felt, her full lips briefly, forcefully brushing against mine. I didn't get it. 2000 - our forever bond was tested by our peers, who started saying that boys and girls couldn't be friends, even though we'd been thick as thieves all our lives. we didn't care, we still went down to the beach and ran away from the waves, getting our sneakers wet and making our moms mad. it was around this time my siblings stopped even trying to hang out with us. 2003 - hormones. athena developed early, suddenly our friendship felt weirder and i started to think everyone had been right about boys and girls and how they can't be friends, not really. i couldn't get her burgeoning curves out of my head, i couldn't stop focusing on her lips when she talked... we drifted a little, but stayed friends. 2005 - athena kissed me and once she had i realized how badly i'd wanted her to for the last five years or so. i was elated, it felt like a homerun in front of a stadium of my peers, i felt drunk from it. we started dating immediately, though in all honestly not that much changed...we made out a lot more, and didn't get so riled up by the intervention of others, with their 'sure jan' attitudes to our friendship. we didn't even care that they had been right all along, and that's exactly the kind of thing i usually care deeply about. 2007 - i was madly in love with that girl by this point, which is hardly a surprise. what was surprising was the positive test result, and how negative her reaction to it was. something shifted immediately. 2010 - the sparkle was long gone, but we had limped on for a while. i want to say that i understood when she eventually called it off on that unseasonably cold summer's day in 2010, that i felt some sort of relief. but i didn't. it felt like a big slap in the face from fate, and i was so tired of it all, so mired in my own depression, that i didn't put up a fight. it had been the only time in my life i hadn't, and it's the only time i really wish i had. 2014 - time marched onwards, as it always does. broken and unwilling to fight anyone, including my parents, i enrolled in law school. i studied and i sat the exams, i passed and i went to my father's firm. it took a while for news of athena's ventures to reach me, and a while after that for people to realize she was talking about me... i didn't like it, and i called to tell her so. not that she cared. athena never really cared about much. 2018 - four years on and i still care. as a teen i was so private that telling someone my name felt like a grievance, so you can imagine what it's like having someone talk about the most intimate details of your life to an ever-growing global audience. ignoring it hadn't worked, so i confronted the problem head on, by showing up one day at some live recording, sitting through it and waiting my turn like all the other schmucks. but i wasn't like them, i knew something they didn't, i knew that she was a fraud. not that she made it all up, or that she even elaborated (though she does). she's a fraud because she fakes her reactions to her own life, she manipulates the narrative just so, making sure that she gives away just enough to make her look a little tiny bit bad, only to finally firmly lay her problems at the feet of another. when the time came though, i didn't ask her what i'd planned on - why do you think it's okay to hijack and repackage others' narratives for your own commercial gain, in case you were interested. Instead I decided to keep it brief, to go straight for the question I most wanted answered: why? She didn't have much to say. WHAT MATTERS MOST IS HOW WELL YOU WALK THROUGH THE FIRE. recent purchases SOME SNEAKERS "my sister needed a style upgrade, merry christmas b."  A NEW APARTMENT "couldn't stand the guys above me, so i bought the place above them."  AN ESCORT "whores are more honest, and cheaper than most girlfriends."  I WANTED THE WHOLE WORLD OR NOTHING. a classmate - "Julian Buchanan, sure, I remember him. Nice enough kid, mostly kept himself to himself. Even amongst us rich kids he was wealthy, everyone knew the Buchanans, though you didn't get that vibe from Julian himself. Not like you did with his brother Tripp, he looked at everyone like they were shit on the bottom of his shoe. Julian was always sort of half in, half out... not unpopular, he was too handsome and too good at boxing for the girls not to fawn and the guys not to respect him. But a bit of a loner. Kept a tight friendship group, spent a lot of time in the library at lunch. Man that kid could read, he'd go through a book a day, devouring them... he was always nice enough to speak to, but I got the sense that it was something of a front, like he was just doing it because it was easier than being mean. The only time I saw him really smile was when he was around Athena McCarthy, but hey, he's a red blooded male. No one's that stoic." his mother - "Julian is an Indian giver, whenever he gives with one hand, he takes away with the other. A bright student, we were called into the school to ask if he could potentially be cheating on his English homework. How does one cheat at English homework? I explained that we couldn't buy books fast enough for Julian, so it shouldn't have been a surprise. However, he played truant, he got into scraps with the other boys, I was always getting calls from mothers saying this and that. He claims he was always provoked, of course, but it's hard for me to believe that when he's spent his whole life giving me a migraine. Julian's pièce de résistance came when he was but seventeen. He pleased us by dating Athena, a girl of good stock. But of course Julian is Julian, and what joy he brings us must always be undone-- so he got her pregnant. How he could be so stupid I will never know, but even now I'm relieved that fate was avoided. Athena didn't grow up to honor her pedigree, whilst Julian finally did the right thing and studied law, finally taking up a position at his father's firm. I knew he'd grew out of his silly rebellion one day." himself - "In this world people either want to kill you, fuck you or be you. I wish I felt that certain about myself, 'cause I want none of the above. I hated being born rich. Obviously I don't expect you to feel sorry for me, I'd hate you to actually. I'm just telling you how I felt, and how I felt was that I hated it. Hated how easy it was, how people treated you like you were somehow better than them... how you can glide through life, being handed opportunities when so many people, most people, have to fight so hard to get anywhere near as close. Don't get me wrong, I don't feel sorry for those people. I envy them. I want a life of grit and authenticity, where the world is harsh and I'm forged by my struggle. I'll never have that, though. Even if I tried (and I did), if I gave it all up, it'd still be like playing pretend. It's in my blood, that privilege. I feel diabetic with it. I move through the world like a ghost, I feel like we're strangers to each other. My brother says I'm a pretentious asshole and that one day of hard graft would have me changing my tune, but he doesn't get it. I want to be a man, but I'll always be a boy." BEAUTIFUL LIES. THAT'S WHAT PEOPLE NEEDED. |
lex . rene grincourt . resident |