Kawaru's Saga. Part 2- Electric Boogaloo
...She still talked to him, on ICQ, through email, and over the phone. Nash talked to me, occasionally. But after she gave up on Joe, she went for another of my good friends-- he went after her, actually. Michael was a good friend, a bit of a religious fanatic and despite being quite tall, still behaved like he was a few years younger than he was. I had known him for about four years by this time. The band took a trip to Florida that spring and I really had a lot of fun(well, for the most part, I'll talk about it in a minute.) as did most everyone.
On the way down there, I sat a few seats away from Carrie on the bus. Every time I thought about how she was ignoring me and treating me like a non-person, it made me feel horrible.(By this time, I have already snapped into crying and/or screaming at people and punching walls for no apparent reason for the past few months. I couldn't even control myself anymore, she was making me feel so bad.) When we were almost to our destination, a guy I didn't like very much was listening to his cd player. It was up extremely loud so we could all hear it. He was dancing around in the aisle right next to my seat and I snapped:
Normally, I never swear at all, so this was very strange coming from me.
"Hey, dumbass! Sit the fuck down!" He just kinda looked at me after I said that. So I yelled at him again. "Hey, dipshit, I'm talkin' to you!"
He took his headphones off. (By this time, the entire back half of the bus was turned around looking at me, and trying to see what was going on.) "What?"
"How 'bout you sit the fuck downbefore I beat the shit out of you?"
Then things got worse. He told me to "bring it." When I heard that, I lunged from my seat and put my hands around his neck and squeezed. He tried to kick me in the crotch, but since I'm a lot taller than he is, I just stepped back while still choking him, and avoiding the kick. Three or four people had to pull me off of him. I was so mad, I took my anger out on someone who wasn't even involved, and I never thought I would be capable of hurting someone. Always before, when I would get into a fight, it would be because the other person started it and I always got beat up badly. But here I was, feeling almost ready to kill, all because of how bad Carrie had made me feel by leading me on("Kawaru, I love you." "I'll always love you." "Not to use the hackneyed phrase, 'you complete me,' but that's how I really feel sometimes. It's like we're two halves of the same person." She has said all of these things to me, and like an idiot, I believed it all.). I could never understand how she could love me but date every guy around me except me. I felt like the most worthless person and I started to hate God for ever creating me. (An awful way to react to rejection from a girl, I know. But it was the first time anyone outside of my own dysfunctional family that had ever claimed to love me. I guess I didn't know how I was supposed to react.)
Once we got to the hotel, I tried to forget about what happened and have a good vacation. Halfway through the trip, I was severely reprimanded by Carrie for behaving like a child and throwing "temper tantrums" and having "pity parties." (Sometimes, I would be really depressed and when I felt worthless I asked her what was wrong with me and why people didn't like me. She hated that. Ooh, she hated that. Sometimes, she'd go days without talking to me, to give me time to "grow up" or something. [But her "pity parties," as she called them{well, that's the name she gave to mine}, were something else entirely. I think she wrote the book of double standards and lived by every bloody one of them.]) That made me feel even worse.
(And the day after that, I remember Michael saying to me, "ya know, I think Carrie likes me. I'm gonna see if maybe she'll go out with me." And you guessed it, he already knew how I felt about her and the way she'd treated me before.)
All I remember from the last night we were in Florida was that I came back to the hotel in a pretty good mood. I was gonna get something to drink from the vending machine. But there wasn't anything that I like in the machine on our floor. But it was room check time and the band director wouldn't let me go to another floor to find something to drink. So as I walked back to my room, I snapped again, over something as stupid as that. I remember coming into the room, throwing my loose quarters onto the floor and then jumping up onto the bed and punching it as hard as I could over and over yelling that I wanted someone to kill me. When I realized that punching the bed didn't work, I starting banging my head against the wall.I was completely out of control. James, Joe, and another one of my friends were in the room also at the time, so they saw everything that happened.
I think they left the room after room check because I remember none of them were in the room later, though I don't remember them leaving. I started calling all the other rooms around mine and cussing everyone out. I knew that all the rooms around there were full of other people whom I considered friends, so why I called those rooms and cussed out whoever answered is beyond me. Maybe I was trying to make enemies, I'm not sure. But I remember calling one guy's room and after I cussed him out and told him I'd kick his arse, he invited me to come down to their room and prove it. So I did. But when I got in there, he told me to leave(because he's seen me "psycho" before) and I promptly choked and picked up by the neck, a friend of mine, a good friend who really looked up to me and not many people do that. Because of my stupidity and rage, I almost lost a friend. Luckily he is a very forgiving person and knows I was having it rough.
After we got back from Florida, I had myself checked into the hospital. I really didn't feel like everything was right with me. I kept getting depressed and angry every time anyone mentioned anything about Carrie. And I choked two people in one week, when before, no matter how angry I got, I wouldn't do anything. In fights, I always got beat up. I was afraid to fight back, because I didn't want to hurt anybody. But somehow things changed. I was becoming violent inside and I didn't like it, not at all.
I was in the hospital for a week, and I knew it wasn't the right place. All the doctors kept asking the same inane questions and they had no idea what was wrong with me. The other patients were all in more need of help than me. Two kids strung out on crack... all kinds of other things. It wasn't a very bad place, but I knew they couldn't give me the help I needed.
I got out and apologized to a lot of people for things I'd done and said. I started trying to look on the bright side of things. But then Carrie started talking to me again. And she was always whining about something. No, it wasn't "talking about a problem" anymore, it was "whining." She was always talking about how cold it was at her house, and always talking about some sort of illness she said she had. Apparently, the doctors have run tons of tests and they have no idea what it is. She's had it for years, it makes her get dizzy and/or faint a lot, and it's slowly eating her stomach. She was always talking about it acting up, and she's the most accident-prone person I've ever met.
(The disease is another lie, but the accidents were real. It amazed me how she always managed to cut herself, step on stuff, fall on stuff, have stuff fall on her, etc. Maybe she was just masochistic, I'll never know.)
Now, back to Michael. It angered me to know that a friend of mine would ask out the girl he knew I had feelings for. But I didn't figure he'd really do it. I noticed that he was hanging out with her a lot more often. One day, he brought her flowers. A lot of flowers. Her birthday was coming up soon, and though she'd been ignoring me a lot, I was still determined to give her the gift I'd been making for a month or two by then.
Her birthday happened to fall during the Thanksgiving break that year. I gave her the present. It was a song. I wrote a song for her, recorded all the parts. Piano, sax, muted trumpet, bass, vibraphone. I don't have a lot of money, but I was blessed with a musical ability. The song was nearly 5 minutes long. (I decided to write a song for her birthday this year, because the year before, I didn't even know when her birthday was, and for Christmas I wrote her a poem. I wrote tons of poems for her after that, so I figured a song would be really different.) She really liked it and said that no one else had remembered her birthday.
(Later, I found out that she had been dating Michael at that time. He didn't bother to come visit her or call her during the break. Also, during that whole 5-day weekend, Michael had a girl staying at his house. He said she was "just a friend," but they had gone out before.)
I found out that Carrie and Michael had been dating when during the first week of December, Michael called me. The first thing he said was, "Carrie and I broke up." I was rather shocked, because until then, I had no idea they were ever together. Carrie certainly never told anyone about it. I asked her about it and why she never told me about it(keep in mind, she said we were best friends, and we told each other "everything"[I told her everything, that was definitely not the case with her]). She got mad at me and I'm not really sure why about that either.
That was the end of problems between us that were caused by me trusting her too much. My senior year started, and I decided(for the first time) that I didn't want to be associated with her anymore. For a while, I didn't think about girls. Eventually, I started thinking that maybe not all girls were like Carrie. And there was a girl who smiled at me a lot, and talked to me a lot too. Most girls didn't talk to me or even look at me, so I thought she might like me. She was a nice girl, but she was one of Carrie's friends. I'd known her for almost as long as I'd known Carrie. I thought I'd ask her out. But I wasn't sure if she had a boyfriend or not. I was a chicken and I had a friend ask for me. "Hey, Gary. Could you do me a favour? I like Nikki, but I'm not sure if she has a boyfriend, or if maybe she's interested in me. Could you find out?" (Sure he could. And he did, because he's cool like that.) Anyhow, Carrie found out that I was talking to Nikki. She became furious. Yelling at me because I liked a girl who happened to be one of her friends. She sad she was mad because she "knew I was just using Nikki" to hide my feelings for Carrie, or something equally laughable.
Carrie would not let me near Nikki for a long time. Finally, Nikki told me that she didn't feel like she was ready for a relationship at the time, and since I was going to be going off to college in a year, she didn't want to be in a long-distance relationship. Ok, at least it's a halfway good reason, sounds more like a reason than an excuse. Ok, I'll live with it. "Ok, I understand. It's alright."
Around October of the same year, I met another girl, René. I had seen her quite a few times before, because earlier that year, she started going out with Joe. Also, she was in the colourguard, and I recognized all the people who were in the band or colourguard. But we had never really been introduced. One time that we had a free day in jazz band(colourguard was at the same time as jazz band and they also had a free day), I was playing the piano in there like I usually do, and she really liked the song I was playing, so she started talking to me. She knew my name, because she knew I was one of Joe's friends.
The next day was another free day for everyone(because all of the directors were gone again) and she came over to the piano and sat down next to me. And she was always looking right at me and smiling while we talked. (For reference, on a scale of 1-10, in looks, Carrie was about a 5, while René was easily an 8.5.) I couldn't get over how pretty she was and the way she looked at me was unbearable. The way she looked at me, it felt like she was telling me that she found me interesting. That in itself was a great feeling. Then she started hugging me and hanging all over me. And playing with my hair. All of that made me very uncomfortable, because I knew there had to be something completely wrong with this picture. Then I remembered. "Holy crap, that's the girlfriend of one of my best friends. I can't do this. It's wrong." But then I thought about how she must feel for him, so I knew she was just hugging me in a friendly way, and besides, there were one or two other girls who occasionally played with my hair. That's what I told myself.
But that night, she came on ICQ. Apparently she got my number from Joe. We started talking, and then after a while, she sent a message saying:
"I like you, Kawaru."
"Thanks."
"I really like you, Kawaru."
"Heh, thanks again." Nice to know somebody likes me.
"No, Kawaru. I really like you." Now I'm not sure in what way she likes me.
"Yeah, you said that already. But thanks."
"Kawaru. I like you like you." Now I'm afraid, because I know what she means and I don't want to be the cause of any trouble. Especially not with Joe, because he's a good friend. (Yeah, she sounded like a little kid, and that's because she was. I was a senior and she was a freshman.)
"But, what about Joe? He's your boyfriend."
"I know..." Oh, crap.
"I, I can't believe this..."
"Couldn't you tell by the way I was hanging all over you today?"
Well, I kinda thought that, but I tried to push it out of my mind. Coming between the two of them was something that I really wanted to avoid. But somehow it happened-- well, at that point, it hadn't happened yet, but I was afraid it would get there.
So we talked on the phone about it. She said she felt bad since she liked me but had a boyfriend. I said it kinda made me uncomfortable, because it did. Still, we continued talking and neither of us really tried to stop anything from happening.
A few days later, at school, we were talking again, and she asked me, "why don't you look at me? Why don't you look me in the eyes?" And I said it was because I never look people in the eyes. (Yeah, I lied. I couldn't tell her the truth. I thought I was starting to fall for her. And I knew that was a very bad thing.) Since I wouldn't look at her, she took my watch. And I couldn't get it back. She said she wouldn't give it back until I looked her in the eyes. Later that day, I had to get a friend to get my watch back from her.
The next week, one day, she was practicing outside, and she didn't want to wear her jacket and her bracelet while she was practicing, so I held them for her. I put the bracelet on(it wasn't feminine-looking, it was kinda cool) and I had an idea. I would keep the bracelet for a while so she could see how I felt without my watch. A childish thing to do, but that's what I did. Well, she wanted it back, and I told her I wouldn't give it to her. I told her I'd give it to her that night(we had a parade to go to that night). She agreed after she made me promise I'd take good care of it and not lose it.
That night, I saw her, and I was going to give the bracelet back, but I didn't really want to. I told her I still wanted to wear it, and although she was reluctant at first, she finally gave in and let me have it for a while. "Ok, but don't lose it. Take good care of it. It's really special to me. I wouldn't let anyone else wear it. Don't take it off."
So I always wore it. A few people asked, "isn't that René's bracelet?" I said, "yeah."
"Why do you have it?"
"Um, cause I took it from her and i think it's cool?"
Yeah, that was a bad reason. It was a lie and it sounded stupid, too. Eventually, I couldn't stand the opposing feelings inside me. I didn't know whether I liked her or if I was just desperate. And I knew it was wrong for me to try to take a friend's girl. So I talked it out with René. I gave her bracelet back and told her I really liked her a lot, but that this just couldn't happen. She had already arrived at that conclusion, and during that time had realized just exactly how strong her feelings were for Joe. So that ended the closest thing I've ever had to a relationship. Kinda sad, but when I think about it, I know that that was the best thing for both of us, because she's happy, Joe's happy, and I don't have to feel bad about what I almost did. (They have a very honest relationship, the kind that I hope to have some day. So Joe already knew everything. He knew that she liked me for a while. He knew about the times she kissed me[by the way, she was the first girl to ever kiss me; I was a senior in high school, pathetic], and everything was ok.
(Also, a little thing I forgot to mention: when I first started hanging out with René a lot, Carrie started talking to me again and telling me that René was a whore. She said that René's relationship with Joe was just based on "mutual groping" an that neither of them really cared for the other. And she kept saying that René didn't deserve Joe. This really pissed me off. Joe had been my friend for a long time, and I knew he was mor than capable of deciding who was good enough for him. René had become a good friend too by this time, and I knew she was none of the things that Carrie was trying to make her out to be. And I knew that their relationship was real. The only reasons Carrie started spouting all this crap was because she was jealous that I was around another girl more than her, and because she was jealous that another, prettier, nicer, and incredibly more honest girl was with Joe, the guy she'd tried so hard to get a while back. It totally pissed me off.)
After this, Carrie started trying to become my friend again. I was lonely and stupid, so of course, I let her right back into my life like a fool. It was then that I became Captain FreeTherapist for the millionth time. She had met some people on internet, and she decided to actually meet them. She started dating one of them, and the other guy and some people who'd never actually met her became jealous and angry at that other guy, and she kinda took him from another girl anyway(or at least that's what she told me). The other girl turned all her other online friends against her, and the guy broke up with her. Then it was my job to put the pieces of her broken life back together and console her. I tried everything imaginable. I let her know I still cared about her. (I honestly did, I was too ignorant and too much of a nice guy to just quit caring.)
When it was time for prom, René, who had become like a little sister to me(and was far closer to me than any family member ever was), kept asking me if I was gonna go or not. I always said, "no, because I'm a loser and I always just sit at home and do nothing. Besides, no girl would ever want to waste her time on me." She knew that I had once had strong feelings for Carrie, so she suggested that I ask Carrie. I thought it was a pretty lame idea, but she just knew Carrie would say yes. Long story short, Carrie said no, but it wasn't really just "no." It was more like, "what would people think if they saw us together?" That's what she said, plus she already had a date. I asked her if she would have gone with me if I'd asked her first. She still said most likely not. (Yet she always claimed we were best friends. I never tried to make it sound like a date. I clearly stated that I'd like for us to go as friends.) Carrie told me, though, that Nikki didn't have a date and was just waiting for someone to ask her. She told Carrie that she'd go with probably any guy in the band who wasn't a jerk. She named a few people. I wasn't one of them. Great, I thought, maybe Nikki would go with me. I asked her, but she said she didn't think she was gonna go to prom. But then a few days later, she asked another guy that I knew. She asked him. Well, a few weeks before prom, he had a change of plans and couldn't go, so I asked her again. She still said she thought she'd either not go, or just go by herself. I didn't know what to think of that. So I asked another girl, Meredyth. I didn't know she had a boyfriend at the time. Guess who it was. Michael. Funny thing is, she ended up going with Michael's brother because Michael had asked someone else to the prom.(All of these people are wackjobs, apparently.)
(Eventually, I decided to go anyhow. I went with a big group of friends. This was only the second dance I'd ever been to in my life. I actually had a lot of fun, and somehow, I was able to dance with all three of the girls who turned me down, which further proves my previous point: all of these people are wackjobs.)
Finally, I decided it would be best(for the second time) to try to distance myself from Carrie. At my graduation, as I was saying goodbye to everyone, I stopped to talk to her for a while. I said goodbye and I kissed her on the cheek(first time I had ever kissed a girl; why I decided to kiss her-- like so many other parts of this story-- is a mystery.). It was supposed to be goodbye, but it didn't turn out that way. I had stff to go to after the graduation ceremonies and such, so I took a few pictures with some of my friends, and then left to prepare for the rest of the night's activities. (Before I left, though, I found René, gave her a big kiss, and then gave her my blue graduation cap[after telling her mother over and over again that I was sure I wanted René to have it].)
For most of the summer, I just tried to lounge around and forget about my troubles. I thought about what college would be like, and how I could finally get away from Carrie, and pursue my dreams. In the back of my mind, an ever-present thought and feeling inches forward, desiring to make itself known. I felt lonely. Still alone. And I remembered what Meredyth, Carrie, and Nikki always told me: "Don't worry, I'm sure when you go to college, you'll find a nice girl who likes you for who you are. Any girl who'd pass up a guy like you has got to be stupid." (Are they calling themselves stupid? They certainly must be, because they rejected me. Or are they being hypocritical?)
I wanted to go to college. I was going to have a lot of fun, and learn a lot in my chosen field of study. One day, while I was trying to sleep(when school's out, I stay up late, and that results in me waking up most days at about 3 PM), I got a phone call from Carrie. (She always talked to me only when she wanted something from me.) She asked me if I would fill in for their instructor at band camp, because he had gone away for the weekend and accidentally wrecked his car, leaving himself stranded far from home for a few days. I accepted the offer because I saw it as an opportunity to see all my friends again. (Most of my friends were younger than me and thus, still in high school.)
I arrived at the band room at lunch time. Hardly anyone saw me come in, because there were only a few people in there. I came in through the back door, and almost everyone was eating lunch outside. I began my warm-ups, and people finally started coming into the room. Meredyth came in through the back door and saw me all the way from the other side of the room. She yelled my name and ran across the room to hug me. More and more of my friends entered and we greeted each other. It was a rather happy occasion for me. Nikki and I talked for a few minutes about how things had been going during the summer. Finally, Carrie showed up. She walked slowly past me, and as she came toward me, she spoke. "How's it going, Kawaru?," she said, in the quietest and most unenthusiastic voice imaginable. She almost managed to look somewhere near my general direction as she talked. (Yeah, that's right. For some unknown reason, she looked down at the floor the whole time, and almost looked at me once. I went there because I was asked to[requested by some friends], and doing a favour for someone I was naïve enough to believe was actually my friend. At the time, I ignored the incident, because I was just happy to see my friends.)
During the freshman studies week at college, I met another girl, quite by chance. (It was also our week of band camp.) I looked behind me on the first day, when we were on the field. Far off at the back of the field was the prettiest girl I'd ever laid my eyes on. She was beautiful, a real angel. But I couldn't talk to her. No way. I knew a girl like that had to have a boyfriend. I tried to forget about her, but I couldn't put her out of my mind, no matter how hard I tried...
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Kawaru's Saga. Part 3- The Finale...
"They live among mortal men as a nagging burden and are no good sharers of abject want, but only of wealth. Men are like swarms of bees clinging to cave roofs to feed drones that contribute only to malicious deeds." -- Hesiod, on women.
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