With a swift ninja strike, she hit me right between the eyes. Two prongs, two sentences, and she ripped through the bullshit. Abrasively upfront and without pretenses, and completely uncensored, this loud mouth girl asks, “What’s the matter? Are you still hung up on your Ex, Baby Boy?”
Under normal circumstances, I’d welcome that breath of fresh air. But it wasn’t that she was REAL and that this was her being her. There was a take it or leave attitude, with a hint of bitterness. Because I’ve met REAL people. My closest friends, those that touch me most, they’re REAL. This girl is caught wanting; she is something else, a Pretender. It’s common rule, etiquette, not to put people’s shit on blast, but she didn’t care. She was drunk, and her powers of observation was use defensively in attack. One word after another after another, her sentences blasting away. First at me, then at my boy.
For sure my mindset wasn’t right. In lack of clarity, a conspiracy arose unintentionally undermining me and breaking the bonds of trust I held so dearly. Choosing to see me as who I was in the past instead of who I was now in the present, brought on a wave of demons that surges over me. In that moment, I was a broken little boy. So with what little power remaining, in calm and collected fashion, I held on as that burnt ambiguity between buzz and sober on the nasty side of the fritz, fizzled and died. I would hold on until it gave. I turned to my breathing. I removed myself from the happening, and alone on the balcony seven floors up, I breathed. I just breathed. I made phone calls to some people I know I could turn to, but those attempts failed leaving me not wanting to reach out any further. This was me alone, and I would have to face this so.
“Do you ever feel like you’re the only sane man in an insane world?” I asked a friend who was too intoxicated to really respond. Instinctively, she knew to hug me. That’s why I like her; she is REAL. Maybe not all the time, but when it counted, you knew her heart was in the right place. “Or maybe I’m the one that’s crazy, and everyone else is insane.” She reassures me. What else could she have done? Was there really anything else that I wanted?
Under normal circumstances, I would not have been so vulnerable. But battling an addiction is tough. Battling your own demons and insecurities is no picnic. Battling them both on the DL during a social party is like walking on glass. Then this Pretender blasts away. Yeah I get it. She’s festive and enjoying herself. She wants to keep it REAL. Than why blast at me and deflect? Why cutoff my boy mid-sentence and call me out like you have the right? Because you're REAL doesn’t give you access to drag my shit out into the light. Because you have a partial four-year shrink degree doesn’t give you the right to stab at my wounds. Especially since you don’t really care, nor do you want to solve this mess. You just want to exercise your prowess. Yes you’re observant, and yes, you can get into my head. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. You’re instinctively good at what you do, but your defenses just did some damage. Ethics and etiquette, perhaps pretenses, but sometimes that’s what being REAL is. It’s to know what the situation calls for, that your energy was conquering that it smothered that flailing flame and hushed that lonely birthday candle is tragedy.
And I do what I do best. I take it on the otherside. “I just want to save this microcosm of a world, and I can’t even do that.”
