Hopelessly Hopeful (Phan fiction)

Chapter 1

“Come on. You have to come with us,” PJ pleaded yet again, looking at me with those big, green eyes of his that made it almost impossible to refuse him anything.

I frowned, thinking, a great friend you’ve got there, before biting my tongue ruefully. Because at least I had people I could call my friends, which still was not something that I was all that used too, even after all this time.

There are certain things friends are supposed to be. Helpful, sincere, understanding and forgiving being some of them. If you find a person who is exactly those things and who, on top of that, also shares most of your interests, then you are goddamn lucky. Because finding someone like that, someone who is happy to help you with everything, who you trust enough to share all your thoughts with, who puts up with your bad habits and stays with you through everything, is one of the most difficult things.

Humans are, as Thomas Hobbes had already proclaimed in the 16th century, fundamentally evil. They are liars. They are selfish. They are manipulative. If you fully depend on another human being, you will most likely be let down more than just once. Which is exactly why it is so incredibly difficult to build up real, honest relationships with people. You always have to keep in mind that there is a possibility – however small it may be – that the other person is only using you for their own selfish reasons. You can never be sure if someone actually enjoys your company and likes you for who you are, or if not maybe they are just pretending for whatever good that may do to them.

So really, keeping all of this in mind, the most important quality a friend should have is probably honesty. It’s the one variable that leads to either the making or the breaking of a friendship. Sadly enough I had to learn that the hard way.

All throughout Secondary School I was on the assumption that I had found the three people I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. They were perfectly nice and kind, trustworthy, understanding and there for me whenever I needed them. Only much later did I learn how wrong I had actually been in believing that they were anything but complete jerks towards me. They played the sweet, loving friends whenever I was around or within earshot. They sat with me during Lunch in school. They texted me in the evenings. They hung out with me sometimes, although I did find out later that more often than not they spent time together without me. Just the three of them meeting up and talking shit about other people – another thing I found out only when it was already too late.

It still surprises me now how oblivious I had been back then. There had been enough signs after all that they were only playing me for a fool, subtle ones mostly but also really blunt ones that, thinking about it now, I really ought to have picked up on. Like that one time when I asked if they wanted to come over after school and they all had perfectly reasonable excuses why they couldn’t make it. I believed them right up to the point where they suddenly posted a picture on Facebook of them hanging out.

I was quite dumbfounded, to say the least. Utterly confused and not able to comprehend why they would lie to me like that. It was like wiping a fogged window clean after years of not realizing that you’d been looking through mist the whole time; suddenly everything was perfectly clear. I didn’t like what I saw at all.

Thinking back, it was probably exactly that event and a few minor ones following up that made me doubt my friendship with those guys. From then on I didn’t take their words for granted anymore, didn’t believe any of their excuses. I stopped sharing my secrets with them, knowing perfectly well that they would most likely not stay just between the four of us.

It was hard at first not to have anyone to talk to anymore. But it was even harder to see the three people I had put so much faith into slowly drifting away from me just like that, not caring at all when I broadened that gap that had opened between us further by ignoring them in school and not returning any of their calls, not that they actually tried to call all that often.