365 Days (Part 1) | ✓

35. War and Peace

35. War and Peace: Write about a recent conflict.

A/N: It's been a rough week, and so this turned out a bit dark...

I once read that there were only five types of conflict a human can have:

Man against man.

Man against beast.

Man against nature.

Man against God.

And man against himself.

I was thinking about this when I saw today's prompt, and I have come to the conclusion that sometimes, a conflict isn't just one theme. Sometimes you're against thousands of opponents. Today I faced off wih at least 3/5 of the above list.

It's was a simple thing. So small and insignificant, so silly and unimportant. The worst fights begin thus, because the worst fights are not the ones that appear with a mighty flash, but are the ones that build up.

I'll call her Jen.

She's the type of person that gossips and condemns other gossips. She's the one who will reveal everything about you to everyone else when you're not around. She will always jump to conclusions, she will be furious at any suggestions you are right and she is wrong, and she will insist and nag and bother until you do as she wants.

The worst thing about Jen? She is so persuasive that she can make you feel whatever she wants you to feel.

I am scared of her. I am scared of what she says about me when I'm not around. I am scared of how she is influencing other's opinions of me. I am scared of what she can do to me -- ruin my life, make me happy, make me sad.

I love Jen, and sometimes I wish I didn't, because of the way she has hurt me.

One day, I will probably tell you my story. Or maybe if you read all of these short stories you'll be able to piece together what has happened to me. I have alluded to depression before. It wasn't just that though. I was suicidal. One of the causes of this was Jen, and the things she did to hurt me: the comments, the looks, the put downs. I was inferior to her and I knew it.

It's always been a continual struggle with her. Although I represent her here with her faults, she is not a bad person. She loves, is loving, and is loved. She cares for people. She sacrifices what she has for others. That's why it's so hard with her, why I can't let her go.

That is the first struggle. Man against himself. I cannot release Jen. Something in me, the part that loves her, prevents that. I will always love her, but I need to stop being dependent upon her for my happiness and my mental well-being.

Today we fought. I don't tell her how much of what she does hurts me very often, because she will just throw it back in my face with what a terrible person I myself am. So my resentment just accumulates, and then explodes at the slightest incident.

Simple, like I said. She did it all the time. Why should it be any different?

She was annoyed with me. She gets annoyed often, but I especially irritate her. In this annoyance, she told a friend of hers something embarrassing about me.

It wasn't a fault necessarily. It was a quirck, but the one thing I didn't want people to know, although I have a lot of oddities. It was something about me that was different, something I had cried over, something that meant a lot to me. She knew how sensitive I was about it. But she just casually tossed it into the conversation with me standing right there, just to make a point with me and others.

The friend Jen said this thing to was also a gossip, and I can be sure that there will be very many people knowing about my thing through her.

I want to be fair, so I will say that I should have done what Jen wanted me to do. It wasn't exactly essential to life, but there was no reason why I shouldn't have done it. It annoyed her. It was probably the thing I did the most that annoyed her.

When she dropped her bomb, I freaked. I yelled, I shouted, I was jerky with my movements. My anger was a raging fire, licking up my feelings until they glowed with stinging heat. I isolated myself and then I burst with all the things I wanted to say to her, but never could because it would end up the worse for me. She had the upper hand, and always would.

This is the second conflict: man against man.

She made me apologize and show her respect later, with that voice of hers that meant I would be in dire straights if I didn't. I did so with clipped tones, making it clear I was not sorry and that whatever she made me do did not change anything but that she has forced me to lie.

My chest felt heavy, and there was a quickening in my throat, like my pulse there was thudding extra hard to keep up with the high emotions. I felt a kind of terrible power that you get when in a rage, but I also felt that nudge of shame, that tiny whisper urging me to turn back from this path of anger.

In other words, I felt Jesus trying to come in and restore me.

The third conflict: man against God, and it is the hardest one yet because there is no victory. You either submit to God or you do not, and when you do not, you always end up worse than if you had submitted.

So you see, there are three levels. The inner, the superficial, and the spiritual. Mind, body, soul. Himself, man, God.

Fights are strange things. Why fight? Why do we humans, already so broken, want to further smash each other up? Why do we insist upon using the most deadly weapon in our arsenal, our words, to kill another?

For as one whose mind has been to Hell and then to Heaven, I can assure you that your words have the ability to shove a person into Hades, where they will be tormented by the inner demons you have helped to release. No one wants that, but it's the small things that escalate into the big things. It's the innocent comments that can cause the most harm. I wonder sometimes how many shadows I have cast in another's soul?

Please be careful with yourself. Please be careful with others. We break easily.