The forest isn’t exactly quiet. It’s not deep enough to wash out the sounds of the nearby roads, the trail we’re on not far from the parking lot. We’ve been sitting there for hours, talking. The first time in three years.
“You did what you wanted to - that’s all people ever do. The rest is just you rationalizing.” “No! I knew what I wanted,” her stare is heavy with subtext, “but it wasn’t working, I needed to fix it, it wasn’t what I wanted.”
“You’re so full of shit,” I don’t say.
…
The view is pretty spectacular. It’s been a beautiful day, the soft edge of summer - it rained the day before, leaving little pools and rivulets around the path we took to get up here. “If you could only have one, which would you choose? True love, or perfect happiness?” “I don’t know,” she says. It’s the first time I’ve met my friend’s new ‘girlfriend.’ He’d sent me a list a couple months back, the girls he was interested in - I’d been helping him work up the nerve to ask them out, and been there when they didn’t work out. Her line was: ‘She has nice eyes, but I just don’t feel that way about her.’ They were giving it a shot anyway. They were both open about not feeling that way, to their credit.
I smile at her. ‘I don’t know’ is a pretty good response. “At least you’re honest with yourself.”
I turn to my friend, he’s got a false-guilty look on his face and a half-grin. “You know my answer.” Of course I do. We share most of our worst qualities with each other. He’d pretty much ruined his life over this one girl, because he thought they were in love. Physical abuse, drugs, cheating, and more - they hit all the high notes. His answer, or at least the one he thinks is his, is “True Love.” Even if it leaves you miserable and broken.
Months later. The last few rays of sunlight are trickling over the horizon. I’m sitting at my desk, staring at my phone. He’s still with the ‘girlfriend,’ and I can’t stop stewing over it. I send him a text - “If you want true love, why are you still with her?” To my great response, he texts back - “You’re right.”
And fuck me, but he actually drives to her house and breaks up with her. “You can’t force the real thing” he tells me after. I’ve never been more proud of him, I’m thrilled that my closest friend is finally living up to his ideals. That he’s finally doing the right thing even if it’s hard, and not always just taking the easy way out.
Two weeks later, I find out secondhand. They’re back together. I ask him about it, and guilt dripping from his voice he mumbles out something. Some permutation on the same line I’ve heard a thousand times before. He got really depressed those two weeks, it was really hard.
I hope he’s happy, at least.
…
It’s cold walking through the city - not winter yet, but it won’t be much longer. We’ve got no idea where the hell we are, and it’s just starting to dawn on us that this might not be the best place to get lost. We make it to the house, though - some guy’s smoking a pipe on the porch. “Welcome!”
My first, only, college party. How exciting. I’m expecting excitement, energy, the pulsing beat of life. I’m not expecting the dirty cooler full of some pink mixture, the guy with empty eyes faking excitement as he hands out shots to the girls in our group. The pathetic little backyard, the kids hanging out on the stairs smoking staring at us, looking for something they’d never find.
“You can’t even taste the alcohol!” James says. Fuck James. I was going to drink, I really was. I was going to give the whole normal thing a real try. But that kitchen made my skin crawl, the pink shit in the cooler, sugar and shitty vodka, seemed so desperate and empty.
I made it 15 whole minutes. I would have stayed longer, probably, but pretty quickly it wasn’t about me anymore. The three girls we’d brought with us were completely wasted. I had a crush on one of them, was why I’d gotten them invited. Two of our guys try to take them home, I see them walking out the gate, say my goodbyes and follow.
The guys are walking ahead of them, not really paying attention - they’re as uncomfortable with the whole party scene as I am, and just thinking about getting back home.
One of the girls is already lost, halfway down some random alleyway. Another is halfway lucid and trying really hard to walk straight. The last is shouting to the neighborhood about how good it felt to have sex with her ex boyfriend on her period.
I’ve never really been around drunk people before this. I mean, people who had been drinking, sure. But not like completely obliterated drunk.
I was upset.
Crazy girl continues talking very openly about sex at the bus stop, and I have to chase off some princes who apparently just hung around waiting to wisk drunk princesses back to their castle. I idly wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t come with, if I’d been some kind of prince charming too. At this point I’m furious.
We get on the bus and the drunk girls are basically five year olds. They can tell I’m upset and try to convince me not to be mad at them. I hate the girl I thought I had a crush on, for turning herself into a caricature of a real person.
We get back to the dorms, safe and sound. Some friends come to take care of them. I get told about how I’m such a good guy, how they’ll definitely remember this in the morning and thank me. I roll my eyes, because it’s horseshit. And no, they don’t remember in the morning. We don’t ever talk after that.
…
He starts talking to me out of the blue. He was the guy who showed me around when I first moved here, back in, what, 6th grade? And here we were, senior in high school, and he’s talking to me again for the first time.
“I fucking hate that guy,” he says, nodding at this tall prick with a fake laugh across the gym. “He tries to get girls drunk and take advantage of them at all my parties.”
Vince. He throws most of the big parties, apparently, and he’s venting to me because all the normal kids are wrapped in high school party culture, and there I am, outside of it all. He bought in, he played the game. He was popular, he had hordes of people interested and involved in his life. And it was eating him up.
Talking to Vince was like absolution. For both of us, really. He got to see there was another way, that there were other people, that it wasn’t just parties with people you hated or nothing. I got to see that, even if I felt like an outcast, even if I felt like the whole world was us vs. them, there were still people like Vince out there and we had stuff in common that was deeper than whether or not we went to parties or were popular.
He invited me to parties, and I blew him off, smiling. Still stuck in our respective roles. We almost made plans to hang out outside of school, try to actually be friends, but it’s hard to break patterns set for so many years. He joined the military, in a way that was quietly suicidal. I heard a rumor that he’d died, but I lost touch with anyone who’d know.
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