Helpless
I hated her. From the cheery rhythm for her soprano voice to the sight of her eyes when she looked at him with perfect confidence and happiness, the thought of her tightened my stomach in the twisting fingers of hate and helplessness.
Helplessness. There was the driving force, the cruel frozen hand that twisted my insides into hopeless knots despite my silent pleading.
No, no.
But I was helpless, and that recognition perpetuated the ice inside me, frozen and motionless. There was nothing I could do. Nothing could stop the changes. I was helpless, with nothing familiar to hold on to, and no one to hear me cry.
She had ignited a spark in the glaciers, when she had finally stood in front of me after months of my brother’s descriptions and stories. It was a warmth that almost burned, sharp and acute. But it wasn’t ice; I wasn’t helpless. Hate was a fire, stoked by my desperation for any action. So I forced the blame on her, and let fire and ice battle inside me.
“You okay, Thea?”
There was a teasing bounce in his words as he questioned my uncharacteristic quiet, months now after our first introduction.
No.
“Yeah,” I matched his playful tone.
He couldn’t know. It wasn’t fair, the tiny surviving rational part of me knew, to blame his girlfriend for my own inacceptance. He couldn’t know about my suffering.
And that painful revelation alone gave strength to the battle in my gut. Another monumental change revealed, added to the list. He had moved away from home, to live near his college girlfriend. My parents began to expect independence in my last year of high school, and my friends began to smother me with conformity. College loomed as a threatening uncertainty. And now – gone were the days we knew everything about each other in sibling love. Another change with which I wouldn’t be able to cope. A final change in the overbearing series that had dominated the last years and carved me hollow until I was only the shell of the confidence I displayed.
“Spacing out?” she asked teasingly.
I waited for the eruption of volcanic hate, but nothing happened. All emotion was exhausted, leaving only emptiness in the familiar battlefield.
I knew it was over. Moisture tickled at my eyelids. Acceptance hurt almost as bad as fighting.
