Different People, Same Pain

"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

My first year of University I played volleyball for a rather small campus with a incredibly lacklustre women’s volleyball team. Enough that others, who will remain unnamed, saw fit to refer to it as a “quasi-sport.” I lived with three other girls in a house rented from a charming old man, called the Tipperary. There are stories I could tell you about these girls, probably things that would chill you from the inside out, things about ice picks and passive aggressive notes, but they don’t matter. If anything these questionable individuals pushed me towards two girls with whom I believed I would be lifelong friends. As a girl, you may find this hard to imagine, but once I stop liking a person… I no longer like them and do my best not to talk to them or really be in their presence. But these girls, my friends, weren’t really like that. They liked to be friends with everyone. Occasionally talk behind their backs but then smile and invite them over to paint nails. I could never really understand.

But, we shared sleepovers, baking, binge watching terrible TV, cleaning, relationship advice and most of all laughter.

I did really like these girls. I liked them since I met them the year before in tryouts. They seemed very nice. To this day they have wonderful parents and siblings. So in my second year of University, barely escaping after threats from my altogether imbalanced roommate about how I would “be sorry” after I left the bathroom a tiny bit less clean than when I first walked into it (who has apologized since, so no offence, but it did happen), I moved in with these two girls, their “life-long friend,” another girl from the volleyball team: a high-maintnance closet porn-watching psycho-prude from B.C. planning out her dull cookie cutter life, my friends brother, and the quiet religious walk-on right side with a french name and very nice hair. I had the smallest bedroom in the house because I am a pushover.

I will lay it all out on the line here and say my biggest faults is that I have a terribly messy room. Even a little dirty. But I always keep the living areas clean, I always helped with chores and recycling etc. But, if anyone will complain about something (aside from my rampant licentiousness, eye-roll) it will be that.

We lived peacefully for awhile. One occasion stands out from the rest as a small blip in said peaceful co-existence however: one night we were all having dinner and I do not remember how this conversation started but the roommate from B.C., the high maintenance one, decided that her almost Bachelor of Arts in Psychology had given her the discerning eye and intellectual prowess of, well, someone more qualified, or with actual scientific or clinical experience. Here’s the punchline… She told me and everyone at the table that strippers etc. didn’t have a choice in their select vocations and that they were all suffering from FASD. They had no choice. And I of course, being not an idiot with no critical thinking skills told her that that was absolutely not true and that people make choices. She wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the night except to make passive aggressive comments to everything else I said. The next day she cried because she couldn’t believe that was my opinion (or that it was scientific fact, I don’t know what caused the waterworks). Later the two girls mentioned earlier (Thing 1 and Thing 2 from now on) got together and told me that they agreed with me. Oh indubitably… because I was right… but, they didn’t want to be stabbed in their sleep by our own environmental activist/certifiedpsychologist (Girl Interrupted) so they didn’t say anything. Which, probably should have been my first clue.

After this, harmony returned to the house. But wait… there were six women in this house, no it didn’t. The girl previously listed as “life-long friend” to my two friends (Thing 1 and 2) was a very intelligent person. I mean, she didn’t know that ophthalmologist and not optometrists did lasic eye-surgery but thats, only like, a whole different career path…But, she was a brain, not just that, she studied harder than anyone I’ve ever known. However, Girl Interrupted and the Queen Brain started spending a lot of time together. Too much time for the other poor girls to take. They were 20 years old and felt very excluded. Which let to a terrifying basement confrontation in which four or five girls began cry and I sat as far away from them as I could on the bed. I felt like I was surrounded by crazy… little did I know. So they cried and pretended everything was ok and better but continued to b***h about each other behind each others backs. Everyone complained about everyone else to me. And I said, “I’m sorry you feel that way, maybe if you’d only talk to the person whom you feel that way about something could get done”. And then everyone would laugh because apparently thats a joke.

Then for some reason I became the centre of attention and after my boyfriend and friend of almost a year and a half broke up with me, I got sloshed on Valentines Day and kissed a boy with a girlfriend… (apparently?). This guy and I had been friends for a long time and it wasn’t my place to tell his girlfriend and apparently he didn’t even remember it happening.

At the same time, there was this ridiculous basketball jock that one of my friends had a crush on. But not just a crush apparently. She owned him. I mean, I’m sure she’ll throw her hands up and call me a b***h for saying it but I believe she had some kind of weird fantasy where they were together after they hooked up over spring break. Don’t give away all the milk for free? And this jock? Well I wasn’t interested in him so it became glaringly obvious that he had to get my attention using any means possible. At first I hated him, then I wanted to be his friend. However, I was not “allowed” to hang out with him as a friend. So I did something terrible. I lied about who I was hanging out with. She found out and went ballistic. I drove to the abandoned aquatic centre parking lot cried for 2 hours because I knew I’d done something wrong. Wow, this isn’t trite and stupid at all. I promised to always tell the truth after that. Unfortunately his evil plan worked and I became a feckless bimbo all at the same time. I started to really really like him, but also kind of get back together with my ex boyfriend. I didn’t know what to do. I told basketball jock to leave me alone, about 1499 times.

My friend seemed to be moving on from her initial jock crush because she quickly started sleeping with a creepy hockey player. But it hulked and became an “If I can’t have him, nobody can” situation (to be read with Hulk Voice.)

Confused and hurt and unsure, after asking basketball jock to leave me alone for the 1500th time, he said if I kissed him and felt nothing he would leave me alone. Deeply untrue. And it lead to me driving to Wabasca 10 cumulative hours to tell my kind of- kind of not boyfriend; and some horrible phone calls where I told my friend I’d kissed her personal basketball dream boat and she told me what a horrible selfish person I was. (Even though she literally slept with the crummy hockey guy that same night…) And I’d actually been a great friend aside from not respecting her “possessions". So after the Queen Brain told me that I should go for Basketball Jerk if I really liked him because he could be, and thank you Grey’s Anatomy: my person… she, Winona, Best Friend #1, and half the school iced me out and wouldn’t talk to me.

Oh yeah, and at the same time, apparently the dude that I kissed while hammered on St Patricks day told someone and his girlfriend found out and then the other 50% of the school hated me. Even GI weaselled her way in and started bitching at me about it. I mean, sure that was terrible and I had absolutely no way to make amends and to this day I feel so guilty I’m sick, but Topic B? I felt like a less hot version of Emma Stone or Demi Moore. Throw an A on me, I’m done.

And after all that? After being made a complete pariah? Thing 1 and Thing2 said I was forgiven… Thank you, please inform the student body. Wait are we in high school? I didn’t ever really think those other girls were my friends, with the exception of long haired right side, I’m pretty sure she’s still a nice person. But, after that catastrophe, summer came and she began to hang out with Queen Brain and GI and we never really heard from her again.

I remained friends with Thing 1 and Thing 2 during the summer, despite them wanting me to move all of my things out even though I was paying rent for the entire summer.

GI, the Queen Brain, and Frenchie abandoned my friends half way through said summer and decided they would come back to school and live together without my Thing 1 and Thing 2. My friends were so betrayed. I couldn’t believe they were being treated that way. Those other three girls really didn't talk to them for the whole new year, despite the one being their “life long friend.” God people are s****y. And I comforted my friends and I told them that those people were s****y and there was nothing they could do.

So when fall came it was no surprise that we made a pact to see each other at least once a month because I was moving an hour away to go to a different University. So I lived alone and went to University and a couple of times that year I got really lonely and I wanted to see my friends. Little did I know they were mentally logging away my reasons for coming to see them. I made sure I saw them once a month, and by that I mean I drove an hour at least once a month just to see them. Because I knew they were busy with volleyball…But I went, even when I was working. Even when I was going to school, working, and running a ridiculous painting company. I just wanted to spend some time with my friends.

Simultaneously their little volleyball team was falling apart, girls who used to like them, let’s call them the butter box b*****s were ignoring them. And they were hurt. They were driven to tears because these girls. These girls who treated them like absolute crap. They were mourning the friendship of people who would treat them like that? And I didn’t understand at the time.

So my birthday rolls around and they assemble a little basket of how much they’re pretending to know about me, mixed in with some go-to ubiquitous and stereotypical girly things, like lotion. Someone who knows you knows your favourite colour is lavender and gets you lavender stuff. Someone who is your best friend pays enough attention to know that you don’t like lavender nail polish and purple everything else because you're not 14. It was really nice actually. Like one of those themed raffle baskets. But every time I came down, they wanted to party. They wanted to see other people. I just wanted to spend time with them. What else could you ask for from people you love?

So a week later I told them how I felt. And I was called ungrateful and told I didn’t appreciate how busy they were, that them not visiting me once in eight months was justified and different, because it was them. Talk about attribution bias. I was told that they had no reason to come to Edmonton… because I went to their tiny city for the farmer’s market apparently? I wasn’t worth a trip to them. I got so upset I hung up the phone and we didn’t talk for a week.

Eventually, I called them back and apologized, and they apologized too and said they’d try harder. The next month I went down to visit them again. Thats the time I found out that they’d driven to my city in the middle of the night to pick up their other friend from the airport and that they bought tickets to go to Vancouver for their only week between school and work to see her. That they wouldn’t drive the hour North to see me. Not once in 10 months. They cried way too much to be sociopaths so they must have known how much that hurt me.

So I went home and I didn’t talk to either of them for 2 weeks. Thing 1 got a new phone number so I made sure I called her. We talked for 5 minutes and she told me she felt like it had been forever. I guess she didn’t realize the reason we hasn’t talked was because I hadn’t single handedly made the effort. I didn’t even bother to add her new cell into my phone.

Four months later… I get a text from her sister telling me that she’s being thinking about me. Excuse me?

And I was upset. I didn’t want to fight. I just wanted my friends back. I just wanted to be friends with people that cared about me. People that cared enough to tell me when they were in my city. People that cared enough to drive one hour in 12 months just to visit me.

So I told them I was upset. I told them much of what you see above you, more succinctly obviously.

And do you know what they told me?

That I was pathetic: i.e. That I only came down to visit them because I was lonely.

That I didn’t understand how busy they were.

That I didn’t understand their responsibilities of starting on their terrible volleyball team who never even made playoffs and was full of rookies, or having a boyfriend. Apparently Thing 2’s relationship with her boyfriend was so frail that a one hour drive to Edmonton could shatter it. Somebody get some flying buttresses, or at least a triangle.

That I expected too much of them and of men apparently. Which my then and now boyfriend quickly refuted. My best friend since high school drove 6 hours up to Edmonton and 6 hours down from twice that year just to see me.

I do expect a lot of my friends. I expect people who will actually put effort into seeing me. Who would actually spend one hour driving to my house and one back to their house in a 12 month period. It made me sick to see how they could treat me like that after all of those terrible girls had treated them like absolute garbage. How could they not see it? How could they be so blind?

So people talk about hearts being broken, about romantic love. Friends can break your heart even more cruelly. It’s been almost a year and it still hurts. I’ve had my heart broken by guys before… but this is something different. It’s not moving on to something you think is better, personal growth, or shallowness. It’s literally just someone you love staring at you right in the eyes and for no apparent reason saying: You’re not worth my time, you're not worth anything.

© 2016 Siobahn McKenna

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The Twin Arenas

This was great. Mania and honesty, somehow, when running congruent, make for something very easy to read - almost pastoral or something. Reminded me of, but in no way approached, Catcher In The Rye. Not, like, in no way approached because it's shabby. It isn't. Catcher is Catcher, obviously.