Watching Her

chapter 25: distraction

When people feel hurt, they tend to let out their emotions one way or the other. 

Some people drown their minds in alcohol, awaiting that desperate relief that will never come, to rescue them. They will lay in despair all night as they empty bottle after bottle and ignore the rest of the world. Because what is the world use to them when they can not find their happy end? When they can finally resolve their conflict? The rest of the world is pure nuisance to them if they are not part of their solution. They ignore. They close off. That is what they do best. 

I do not blame them, and yet I am angry at such people. 

Others take a minute for themselves, maybe even a whole day or week. But they come back. They come back from their hiding spot where they contemplated and thought about their decisions. What they did in the past that caused the conflict and their emotions. And their actions in the future. Would they come together and talk? Would they need more time for themselves or even hold distance? Most of the time they were not even the actual problem. They were the bystanders that accidentally got pulled into something they were not even apart of in the first place. 

Sometimes, I wanted to be like them. I even admired them. But I knew I could never be one of them because of how broken I was. How complicated and difficult I was. I would always be the first group of people, no matter how hard I tried to get out of that class. 

I despised myself for being like that, while throwing punches at the punching bag. I felt the sand inside of the leather as it clashed against my knuckles. I was swinging against it with my bare fists, not caring about putting on bandages or even gloves. I knew I was not in control of my own actions, had not been since this morning. 

I hated how I would sometimes wake up and throughout the day realized that I had less to say about my decision than yesterday, or the day before. I hated how unpredictable I was. How I could ruin everything I had built up in a minute. It was easy to break something, I knew that. But it was not easy to build it back up again with the same broken pieces. 

Our conversation had not gotten us anywhere. You could not even call it a real conversation. 

I had addressed the thick silence between us, how it travelled like a cloud until I felt stuffed, suffocated in the air, the rain that was about to fall. 

She had not responded. Just walked out of the door like it was nothing. It was probably easy for her, was it not? It was easy for her to walk away because she was scared once again. I felt my anger speaking in my head, but I did not have enough strength to stop it. 

Everything else around me was black, there was only me. And before I would do something stupid in my anger, I would have to let it out here. In the gym, where I could be alone. 

I felt like needing to scream. To scream at the world for letting this happen to me. At God for letting me alone in this situation, without his guidance I felt so weak. I felt like screaming at Adriana for walking off. For being so ignorant. She could not even be adult enough to want to solve the problem between us. She was no better than a child, that was what I wanted to say to her. She was no better than somebody immature, who just ran away from their problems. 

I was angry at her for leaving like that. She could have just listened to me and say that all was fine, accept my apology. But no, she had to run off. I did not want to be the on to stop her, I would not continue to run after her like all these years. She could solve her anger and her conflict with herself. I did not have enough strength to help her again.

I was tired. Tired with my own body and mind. I was tired with dealing with myself all the time. I was tired with having to think and contemplate. I could not do the same with her. She was her own person and I had tried my best. This was not a scene from a movie where I would run after her in the soaring rain and plead her to accept my apology. Where we would hug and cry in each others arms until our body would be covered in shivers and our clothes be wet.