Have You Ever Seen the Sun Rise at Midnight?

Sides

     It was like a punch to the gut.

    The realization that people were cruel. That you wouldn't be able to ever look at somebody, anybody, ever again and not wonder if they really were like they seemed.

     Because they were- they had been- so nice. Or at least you had thought they were.

     It wasn't that they acted nice in the fake way either, the politician's smile and carefully chosen complimentary words. No.

      They were friendly and talkative, and sometimes you weren't one hundred percent sure if it was a real or fake smile, sure, but they gave insults to you and everybody else, with jokes just shy of offensive, yet still in such a way that it wasn't cruel. They weren't targeted. You and everybody else, themselves included, were a dumb idiot. And you looked like such an idiot as you ran into the same wall as you had just yesterday. But they also looked like such an idiot as they pushed the pull door for the thousandth time that week.

       But now you sat there, unsure what to say, as they told another's secrets, deep, personal ones, not just about so and so's doomed crush.  As they cried, claiming they were so worried about that person, even as they decided they would cut them from their life while admitting to be one of the few people actually in their life. 

      . . . As they told you to do the same thing, no matter what it was you wanted or thought. 

      This person, this person was going through a hard time.

      They had just told you that, alongside the person's deepest secrets... and their doomed crush for that matter.

        You weren't particularly close to who they kept talking about, but you still knew them. You were still friends with them.

         You had sympathized with them as they had struggled with the way your mutual friend had piled all their troubles onto them without any consideration.

        But you had also listened to this mutual friend as they too spoke about the difficult period that they were struggling to go through.

        Both weighed equally heavy on your shoulders. And deep down... you were annoyed each time one turned to you to trash the other in their petty squabble. You didn't show it. Sometimes, you even felt guilty about that annoyance.

But this... this wasn't right. It was cruel. It was almost systematic, the way your close friend worked, in a way you had never, not once suspected at first, turning people against the other. In the same sentence they worried about your mutual friend's shrinking circle of people they could trust, your close friend planned how they would tear away large chunks of it.

And you just watched. Stunned. At the dark side of someone who you thought was such a light spot in your life.

How could they? You wondered. Yet did nothing in your stunned horror, as you watched them cut away the other's social safety net, separating them from the few close people who they could rely on, and getting others to help separate them from the rest.

But then it dawned on you.

How could you?

Because while there may not be anything wrong with lending a sympathetic ear, and you had tried to argue on your mutual friend's side, even if you were closer with their attacker, and you tried not to just gossip about their week spots when your friend complained to you about them... at the end of the day, all you had done was watch.

Uselessly.

You stared down at the letter which had drifted to land at your feet. It's paper, or maybe the ink which formed those painful, pain filled, words, too heavy to hold in a way you didn't quite understand.

You may not have actively harmed them. You may not have contributed to the gossip which flew from ear to ear, from mouth to mouth, all around them, guided by sly words. But. But. You hadn't done anything either way. And that was the fact of the matter.

You hadn't stood against them, no, but you hadn't stayed beside them either.

You thought- you knew that what was going on was wrong, that it was flat out mean, and yet you still just sat back and watched.

People were cruel.

And you were, without a doubt, one of them.

You stood now, but not for anything meaningful. It was too late for that anyway, or so you whispered to yourself some days late at night when you couldn't sleep.

You just stood in those quiet hours when there was nothing left to fill your pointless time, sometimes you sat, it didn't really much matter which. Zoned out. Empty. A fleshy mannequin.

Sometimes your eyes would drift to that paper again, hidden in the bottom drawer stuck within the pages of a book you hadn't picked up before in years, as if all that weight that those words contained held it's own special type of gravity too.

People were cruel.

But how could you judge when at the end of the day you were still one of them?

In some ways... sometimes... you wondered if you were even worse.

An: So, fun fact; I hate pronouns. Gendered, ungendered, I don't care, when writing pronouns are annoying, so I hate them.

The simple fact that I've figured out is that when I'm writing pronouns just get so confusing for me, which is basically why I challenged myself not to use any names in these stories. ( don't judge I gave myself a bunch of dumb challenges for this book )

So if you care to help me out for this story now that I've upped it to three rather than two main characters (a change that will definitely not last); tell me how I'm doing?

-T.A.L.A.