Week 3
Thursday, November 18, 2010
PROMPT: "Focus on a problematic relationship with someone you do not understand. Come up with at least four or five different reasons/motives for why the person behaves this way. Don't worry if the reasons are wacky and don't worry about being wrong, just have fun with the exercise, and try and see if you can find/inject some humor or irony into your narrative voice."
She was my best friend for fifteen years. I don't know if you can actually call someone your best friend when you are two years old, but that was when we met, and our friendship began. She was so full of life. Willing to try anything for the first time. A typical ditzy blonde, always making us laugh at the unbelievable words that came out of her mouth.
Her family became my family. I found myself spending more time at her house than my own, always sleeping over and hanging out after school. The joke around the house was that I was her parents' third daughter. She had one older brother and a younger brother and sister. One day when I walked into her house, the framed family photo that was hanging on the wall in front of the door had a cut out picture of me taped next to the family. They kept that up for years, and it always made me smile whenever I saw it hanging there.
In high school, she began to change. She started to care what people thought of her instead of being the free-spirit she was before. Relationships with guys caused drama between us, both getting mad at each other for spending too much time with our boyfriends than each other. Both getting mad that we were allowing guys to change us. But still, we remained best friends through those drama-filled years, and always had each other to lean on when life was not going our way. She was my only friend that I could vent to about anything and everything, knowing that she would keep all my words a secret.
By our junior year in high school, she started to self-destruct. Her parents were having marital problems eventually leading to a divorce. She broke up with the only guy she ever loved, to later learn that he started dating a girl pregnant in her nineth month, and eventually married her, raised her child as his own, and then had a baby together.
What really tipped the iceberg was when I picked up the phone on that October evening, crying my eyes out while telling her I found out I had a brain tumor. I spent many nights listening to her question God and her Christianity, wondering how God could let something like this happen to a young Christian girl like me. With everything else crumbling down around her, her faith began to disintegrate within her. Watching my optimism was the only thing that kept her hanging on to that little bit of hope she had left. I think she thought that since I wasn't blaming God for the tough circumstances I was given, then she shouldn't either. But this was all before the shocking news of cancer even happened.
The day of my sixteen-hour brain surgery, she and her family waited around in that waiting room for hours. Every day she had her mother drive her to the hospital in Los Angeles to see me. When I was sleeping she would write me letters to read when I woke up. At home she would check the TV Guide and write down what time and channel my favorite shows were going to be on and leave the note card by my bed. But when I was awake, I wasn't a very pleasant person to be around. I was suffering and I let everyone know it. When I was awake I was in constant pain. Still relearning how to swallow, let alone eat, I was taking pain medication on an empty stomach which made me live my days with my head in a vomit bucket.
I was in that first hospital for six weeks. On my darkest day, when no one else was in the room but the two of us, I said something that may have scarred her for life. There is no filter when you are suffering and on pain medication. You say how you truly feel. And in that moment I told her that I wanted to die. I wanted to die like no other person had ever wanted to die before me. I wanted to be put out of my agonizing pain that would not go away. I knew I was never going to be the same. My life was changed forever and it was not a change for the better, it was a change that would devastate the rest of my days on earth. I could no longer play the part of the optimistic teenager who believed that God had a plan for her life and that everything was going to be okay. Because it wasn't!
Without being able to mirror my strength because there was no longer strength inside me to mirror, little by little she drifted away. By the time I was recovering at home, doing my chemotherapy and radiation treatments as an outpatient, she slowly stopped coming around. Her visits got further and further apart, as did everyone else's. The medication made me angry and whenever she did come to visit I was very short with her. Talking as if I wanted her to leave me alone. Who could blame her for not wanting to be around that?
When I went back to school part time for my senior year, she was right there to welcome me back, and did her best to make me feel comfortable wherever I was. As graduation approached, I started to see her resentment toward me. I lost that time in my life to cancer, what I did not realize was that she lost that time in her life to be by my side. Once she saw that I was getting stronger, she started to hang out with old friends again. She started dating a guy that was caught up in the wrong crowd. And eventually, I couldn't even tell who that girl was anymore.
While trying to stay in touch over the summer, and as we both started at different colleges, our visits became very awkward and routine. We'd have lunch or coffee and ask each other the same old questions we did whenever we saw each. How's your family? How's school? How are you feeling?
A year went by and then we didn't see each other at all. I would run in to her occasionally at the gym or where she worked, and when we would say hi, she acted like a different person. Were we really best friends not so long ago? She broke my heart, leaving me virtually friendless at a time when I needed her most. No explanation. She just vanished, and all I had left to do was drown in my thoughts about all the bad things I must have done to make her leave. It took me two years to finally accept that I was never going to know the real reason why she didn't want to be friends anymore and that she was never going to come back into my life again.
When I think about how it all fell apart, I somehow take her side. Blaming myself for not expressing my appreciation to her for standing by me during those first few months. And when my family and friends are curious about what happened, I make excuses for her as to why she became so dark and broken. Although I'll never truly understand her reasons for leaving, I am always going to look back on her daily visits during those first 6 weeks in the hospital as the best gift anyone has ever given me. She was just there, sitting quietly at the end of my bed watching me sleep. What more could I ask for...
PROMPT: "Focus on a problematic relationship with someone you do not understand. Come up with at least four or five different reasons/motives for why the person behaves this way. Don't worry if the reasons are wacky and don't worry about being wrong, just have fun with the exercise, and try and see if you can find/inject some humor or irony into your narrative voice."
She was my best friend for fifteen years. I don't know if you can actually call someone your best friend when you are two years old, but that was when we met, and our friendship began. She was so full of life. Willing to try anything for the first time. A typical ditzy blonde, always making us laugh at the unbelievable words that came out of her mouth.
Her family became my family. I found myself spending more time at her house than my own, always sleeping over and hanging out after school. The joke around the house was that I was her parents' third daughter. She had one older brother and a younger brother and sister. One day when I walked into her house, the framed family photo that was hanging on the wall in front of the door had a cut out picture of me taped next to the family. They kept that up for years, and it always made me smile whenever I saw it hanging there.
In high school, she began to change. She started to care what people thought of her instead of being the free-spirit she was before. Relationships with guys caused drama between us, both getting mad at each other for spending too much time with our boyfriends than each other. Both getting mad that we were allowing guys to change us. But still, we remained best friends through those drama-filled years, and always had each other to lean on when life was not going our way. She was my only friend that I could vent to about anything and everything, knowing that she would keep all my words a secret.
By our junior year in high school, she started to self-destruct. Her parents were having marital problems eventually leading to a divorce. She broke up with the only guy she ever loved, to later learn that he started dating a girl pregnant in her nineth month, and eventually married her, raised her child as his own, and then had a baby together.
What really tipped the iceberg was when I picked up the phone on that October evening, crying my eyes out while telling her I found out I had a brain tumor. I spent many nights listening to her question God and her Christianity, wondering how God could let something like this happen to a young Christian girl like me. With everything else crumbling down around her, her faith began to disintegrate within her. Watching my optimism was the only thing that kept her hanging on to that little bit of hope she had left. I think she thought that since I wasn't blaming God for the tough circumstances I was given, then she shouldn't either. But this was all before the shocking news of cancer even happened.
The day of my sixteen-hour brain surgery, she and her family waited around in that waiting room for hours. Every day she had her mother drive her to the hospital in Los Angeles to see me. When I was sleeping she would write me letters to read when I woke up. At home she would check the TV Guide and write down what time and channel my favorite shows were going to be on and leave the note card by my bed. But when I was awake, I wasn't a very pleasant person to be around. I was suffering and I let everyone know it. When I was awake I was in constant pain. Still relearning how to swallow, let alone eat, I was taking pain medication on an empty stomach which made me live my days with my head in a vomit bucket.
I was in that first hospital for six weeks. On my darkest day, when no one else was in the room but the two of us, I said something that may have scarred her for life. There is no filter when you are suffering and on pain medication. You say how you truly feel. And in that moment I told her that I wanted to die. I wanted to die like no other person had ever wanted to die before me. I wanted to be put out of my agonizing pain that would not go away. I knew I was never going to be the same. My life was changed forever and it was not a change for the better, it was a change that would devastate the rest of my days on earth. I could no longer play the part of the optimistic teenager who believed that God had a plan for her life and that everything was going to be okay. Because it wasn't!
Without being able to mirror my strength because there was no longer strength inside me to mirror, little by little she drifted away. By the time I was recovering at home, doing my chemotherapy and radiation treatments as an outpatient, she slowly stopped coming around. Her visits got further and further apart, as did everyone else's. The medication made me angry and whenever she did come to visit I was very short with her. Talking as if I wanted her to leave me alone. Who could blame her for not wanting to be around that?
When I went back to school part time for my senior year, she was right there to welcome me back, and did her best to make me feel comfortable wherever I was. As graduation approached, I started to see her resentment toward me. I lost that time in my life to cancer, what I did not realize was that she lost that time in her life to be by my side. Once she saw that I was getting stronger, she started to hang out with old friends again. She started dating a guy that was caught up in the wrong crowd. And eventually, I couldn't even tell who that girl was anymore.
While trying to stay in touch over the summer, and as we both started at different colleges, our visits became very awkward and routine. We'd have lunch or coffee and ask each other the same old questions we did whenever we saw each. How's your family? How's school? How are you feeling?
A year went by and then we didn't see each other at all. I would run in to her occasionally at the gym or where she worked, and when we would say hi, she acted like a different person. Were we really best friends not so long ago? She broke my heart, leaving me virtually friendless at a time when I needed her most. No explanation. She just vanished, and all I had left to do was drown in my thoughts about all the bad things I must have done to make her leave. It took me two years to finally accept that I was never going to know the real reason why she didn't want to be friends anymore and that she was never going to come back into my life again.
When I think about how it all fell apart, I somehow take her side. Blaming myself for not expressing my appreciation to her for standing by me during those first few months. And when my family and friends are curious about what happened, I make excuses for her as to why she became so dark and broken. Although I'll never truly understand her reasons for leaving, I am always going to look back on her daily visits during those first 6 weeks in the hospital as the best gift anyone has ever given me. She was just there, sitting quietly at the end of my bed watching me sleep. What more could I ask for...