anger, frustration, rage; love, hate

A Story by Micah

hatred, like most emotions, is a fickle thing.

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anger, rage, frustration; they all meant the same, but had different nuances to them in your head, they were categorized and different and nearly sentient.

anger was when you met him first. he had small, thick, furrowed eyebrows and hair the color of dead moss. his skin was too pale for his hair and you felt like you could see through it, like it was a gossamer sheet tied tightly around his muscle, tissue, and bone.

the first thing he said to you was "your stare is disgusting", and it was tattooed on the back of your brain, where still it remains, echoing with every encounter.

his fingers looked like the boning to a spider's web, thin, splayed, fragile. every time he opened his mouth, you weighed the pros and cons of twisting up his hands in the feather-duster of your own.

all you felt towards him was anger, because he knew, he knew your secret. he knew your stare was disgusting because it weighed him, it judged him; he knew your stare was disgusting because you were gay. because he was a potential "target", a piece of prey for you.

you tried never to look at him again, but it seems he would find his way into your line of sight every time you thought you finally had the right way to walk to class, uninhibited by his presence.

rage was when he tried to speak with you again. 'hello's came out of his thin lips every time you passed by him. you hated his smile, because it was better than yours, more beautiful; because your lips would only ever be sinful, tainted, and the words that came out of them would all be lies.

he seemed to try to find you now, an incredible feat on such a large campus. yes, he was spectacular, but you were useless for being unable to avoid- and forget- a single person who bruised your brain on one occasion.

his small brows were still furrowed and his hair still too dark; his skin was still too pale, too thin, too close to the color of snow for you to ignore each time he passed.

one day, he said, "how are you?"

you responded with, "i'm the boy who's stare is disgusting."

his long eyelashes had cast shadows on his cheeks.

"i'm sorry" was what he offered, and it was meek, and it was all your head could replay when you went to sleep.

frustration was bred from his repeated attempts to curry favor. when he continually crept into your line of sight with sorry's, with apologies, frustration was realizing how sweet his voice sounded, and how gross yours was every time you spit "stop".

frustration was never letting him speak, frustration was going to bed with his face pasted on your inner eyelids. frustration was his relentlessness. frustration was the tears he shed on a cold december evening, when he said to you in a voice so small it was nearly swallowed by the wind, "i'm gay, too".

never had you felt so repulsed. never had you felt so wronged. that he would lie to try to get you to forgive him. what was in it for him? you had never been friends.

you had never been friends, not from the first day to december's, and all you felt towards him was hatred.

"i'm gay," he said, "and i knew you were, so i thought if i said those things, it would distract from me. i'm sorry. it was wrong, i was wrong, and i'm sorry."

frustration was your mouth saying "your apology is disgusting", frustration was your heels turning and leaving him alone.

frustration was crying alone in your bed at night, because somewhere along the line, you had filled in the cracks that he left open. in your head he was exactly as he sounded, and he did care for you in the end, and his milky skin would only be yours, and his too-dark hair and small eyebrows would rise at the sight of you.

frustration was realizing that somewhere, somehow, your fantasies of crushing his thin fingers had turned to holding them like precious artifacts, ancient glass; frustration was realizing that you couldn't accept his apologies because his words and lips were beautiful in the end, but the entire time, yours had been sick and twisted and full of lies.

hatred was realizing you were too full of cowardice to accept his apology because you believed you didn't deserve it. because even before he said "your stare is disgusting", you had thought it.

because you saw his lips as beautiful because they didn't hold the sins that yours did.

hatred was at yourself, was present at every time you thought you weren't good enough, that you were abnormal, hatred was never under his control. you used him as a target for your archery because you had grown tired of hating yourself, because you had thought of every insult in the book and then some, because your heart had no more room to hate yourself, because your heart was gone, it had disappeared.

but, when your hatred for him bloomed, when the anger, rage, and frustration rose, he was at the center of it all. a scapegoat for your insecurities, he brought you back to a place where you could feel something other than hate.

love is unseating years of darkness from your heart. love is letting yourself see again. love is forgiveness, love is persistence, and for you, love has short, thick, furrowed brows and hair too dark for his snow skin.

love is apologies and mistakes and having to teach yourself one step at a time that you're worth it.

for you, love was hatred before it became twisted and warped; love was anger, rage, and frustration because your heart was torn.

before it all, love was hate.

love was hating every single day that you saw him. now, love is hating every day that you don't.