Broken People

by Scott Hildreth

  11) This is your life. Your struggle, your happiness, your sorrow, and your success. You do not need to justify yourself to anyone. You owe no one an explanation for the choices that you make and the position you are in. In the same vein, respect yourself by not comparing your journey to anyone else's.

  12) There is no wrong way to feel.

  13) Knowledge is everywhere, keep your eyes open. Look at how diverse and wonderful this world is. Are you going to miss out on beautiful people, places, experiences, and ideas because you are close-minded? I sure hope not.

  14) Selfless actions always benefit you more than the recipient.

  15) There is really no room for regret in this life. Everything happens for a reason. If you can't find that reason, accept there is one and move on.

  16) There is room, however, for guilt. Resolve everything when it first comes up. That's not only having integrity, but also taking care of your emotional well-being.

  17) If the question is ‘Am I strong enough for this?’ The answer is always, ‘Yes, but not on your own.’

  18) Mental health and sanity above all.

  19) We love because He first loved us. The capacity to love is the ultimate gift, the ultimate passion, euphoria, and satisfaction. We have all of that because He first loved us. If you think about it in those terms, it is easy to love Him. Just by thinking of how much He loves us.

  20) From destruction comes creation. Beauty will rise from the ashes.

  21) Many things can cause depression. Such as knowing you aren't becoming the person you have the potential to become. Choose happiness and change. The sooner the better, and the easier.

  22) Half of happiness is as simple as eating right and exercising. You are one big chemical reaction. So are your emotions. Give your body the right reactants to work with and you'll be satisfied with the products.

  Usually, I did my best thinking while lying in my bed. As I lay there, thinking about what Kid said regarding David, I looked at the list. Number five certainly applied to David. If Kid was correct, and I suspect he was, David had a deep fear of failure. So deep, that he developed a homosexual inner being to prevent himself from failing at a relationship. The thought of someone building a shield or shelter with such conviction fascinated me. I struggled with his being conscious of what he was doing in developing his homosexual character.

  I started thinking about what Kid and I had talked about. Broken people attract broken people. I thought of Kid. We met by chance on the Internet. A one in a 1.2 million chance, from what Kid calculated. I suspect he was right. He was generally right in what he said regarding statistics. He had proven to be a great person, and a great friend, always willing to listen when I wanted to talk. I had spent many nights on the phone with him, talking for hours and hours on end. Most of the time when we spoke on the phone, I hid in my closet so my parents wouldn’t hear us talking. To them, the thought of me meeting someone over the Internet would be beyond what is acceptable. My act of talking to him on the phone would make my desire for tattoos look like nothing.

  Kid had demons that he wouldn’t speak of, but they were apparent. I had spent considerable time piecing together his life, and trying to figure out who he was. I never assumed or thought he lied to me, but it was obvious that he only gave me bits and pieces of his life. The bits and pieces he wanted to. He allowed me to learn the things that he wanted me to know, and didn’t offer to me the parts that he didn’t want me to know. I attempted on many occasions to try to gain information about him on the Internet, but generally failed at finding much. I didn’t even know his real name, and through attempts to track his phone number, found that it was a pay-by-month phone with no name attached to it. He had lived most of his life as a private person, and wanted to keep it that way. Keeping his name a secret was probably yet another way to keep his life with me on a less personal level.

  Some of the things that fascinated me about him were the fact that he gained 140 pounds to shelter himself from people. He was so scared of people failing him that he gained weight to prevent them from wanting to meet him. He became unattractive to the eye so people would look past who he actually was. We all have a degree of fear of failure within us, some maybe worse than others. Kid wasn’t excluded from this. He just wants to live his life without failing, or without people perceiving him as a failure. Maybe he was truly afraid of people failing him.

  I asked Kid once, right after we met, about the incident, as he calls it. He told me he would tell me some other time. I asked him again, on no less than three more occasions, all of which got me the same answer. I will tell you some other time. I had determined that the incident, as he calls it, was when he quit drinking, and quit doing drugs. It was obvious that this was also when he turned his life around and decided to start helping people. Although I wasn’t certain, I think it was immediately following this point in time that he decided to gain weight, and to force people to leave him alone.

  During my initial excitement of meeting him, I told my cousins about him. At that point in time, I had known Kid for about three months. My cousins went crazy. Immediately, they began to question his motives for speaking to me.

  “Don’t give him your real name,” Tiarra said.

  “He will find out your address and rob you,” Marianna screamed.

  “He knows my name, and where I go to school, and he doesn’t want anything from me. All he wants to do is talk to me, and get my opinion about issues that he has with teens. I am a sounding board for him, a means of checking his work, if you will. A teen text book,” I explained.

  “Oh my God, you are so stupid,” Tiarra said, looking at me as if I were an utter idiot. “I met a guy on the Internet, and he fucked me over so bad. He lied to me, manipulated me, and used me for money. Block his number. Call the cops. He’s going to steal from you. I know it,” she continued, standing and screaming at me the entire time.

  Egyptian families are tight knit, and tend to mind each other’s business, even when they shouldn’t. This incident with meeting Kid became a weekly discussion with my two cousins. They constantly wanted to know what he was asking, and what he was doing. Their fear of him wanting naked photos, bank account numbers, and my address continued. Each time I told them that he had yet to request these things, they told me, “It’s just a matter of time.” I thoroughly enjoyed each time my cousins and I met, knowing the questions would be the same, and that I could give an answer that wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Their expectations of him being a pedophile or a thief were unfounded, but I was incapable of changing their minds.

  Although I could talk to my cousins about Kid, I couldn’t talk to my brother or my parents about him. Their ability to digest or understand the situation was non-existent. I would be advised by my parents to cease all discussions and communications with him, and then I would be forced to decide whether to listen to my parents, and grant their request, or go against it and keep a line of communication open. I decided that them not knowing was what was best. I had told Brianna about him, and her response was, “That’s just weird. Bye,”

  Writing things down when I think makes me more able to understand them. I decided to make a list of similarities between Kid and David. I made a list on paper, Kid on the left, and David on the right. As I made the list, the similarities were shocking. Kid, used his weight as a shelter or shield from others. He said it kept people from approaching him. I believed that it was to keep him from getting close to people emotionally, and from later failing. David was OCD. He weighed himself constantly, making sure he was at his target weight. If he wasn’t at his target weight, he would exercise and modify his diet until he was. He counted things. He looked at any and all things that he could, mathematically. He compiled lists in his head, and built statistics. He based his decisions through the course of a day on his expectation of the success of the decision based on the statistics that he had compiled in his mind regarding the situation. Kid did the same types of things. Kid weighed himself, and if he fell bel
ow his lower threshold weight, he ate to gain weight. Kid feared elevators, planes, and riding in someone else’s car. David used his homosexuality as a shield to keep women away, and Kid used his obesity to keep everyone away. As I thought of things to put on the list, I gave up, aggravated, that I had learned what I suspected all along, but never took time to consider.

  Kid feared failure. That’s why all of his dealings with people were over the Internet. It’s why he only had one actual friend, Shawn. It’s why Kid didn’t actually have a job. It’s why he was fat. And, it’s probably why he gave me little or no information about his past. He feared that I would judge him for whatever he had done, or who he had been, and I would abandon him. This abandonment would be perceived, by him, as failure. The more I considered my thoughts, the more sense it made. His abrasive attitude, sarcastic nature, cussing, and calling people names was just a way for him to keep everyone from even wanting to get to know him. Just like the obesity.

  I wanted to talk to David about his homosexuality, and I wanted to talk to Kid about everything. So, I sent both of them a text message. I rolled over on my bed and looked at my list of what I have learned in life. Numbers fifteen and sixteen stood out. There is really no room for regret in this life. Everything happens for a reason. If you can't find that reason, accept there is one and move on. And, there is room, however, for guilt. Resolve everything when it first comes up. That's not only having integrity, but also taking care of your emotional wellbeing. I began to believe that there must be something in Kid’s past that he regretted, or couldn’t accept as being the way that it should be. I would get to the bottom of this as soon as he texted me.

  Waiting has never suited me well. I am about as impatient as a person can be. Waiting for these two to text me made me even more impatient. I grabbed my purse, my phone, and folded the list, placing it in my purse. Going to Cups was probably my best bet, because if David could meet to talk, we would have to meet somewhere other than my home. My parents weren’t particularly fond of me talking to white boys, and especially not a white homosexual boy.

  Driving to Cups, I remembered when I first started to drive. I had begun driving to school, and my parents at the time were becoming less and less interested with my day to day activities. At the time, I was becoming more distant from them. Several things, I am sure, made me feel this way. A combination of me wanting desperately to be my own person, combined with wanting to feel as if there was someone out there that actually, unconditionally, cared for me. My feeling of necessity to separate myself from everyone else, and become my own person was growing daily at that age. My parents’ schedules, and their belief that their daughter was growing older, made them less attentive to my needs. In time, we were more distant than I ever believed we would be.

  Filled with these feelings, I would drive to school daily. As my life progressed, and I became more active in school, my parents became less active in their desire to understand who I was and what I was doing. Feelings of abandonment filled me. I was no longer loved. Frequently, as I drove to school or drove home, I would consider taking the steering wheel, and just yanking it, thrusting myself into oncoming traffic. I had convinced myself that this would be a good way to end the pain that I was feeling at the time.

  One day, I realized that the feelings were something that would, in time, pass. I prayed for the ability to live with the pain. The ability came. Making it through those days was never easy, but every day I prayed to make it another day. And the next day, I would pray for one more. I can’t necessarily put my finger on a date that it got better, or went away, but one day it did. One day I drove to school, and did not have those feelings. And then, another. Before the end of that school year, I had gone for months without having those feelings. I was grateful that I never drove into oncoming traffic, but I wondered how many other kids had feelings similar to mine. I decided, of all of the kids that I knew, I was probably the most responsible, mature, and reasonable thinking. If I had those feelings, I suspected that other kids had those feelings as well. At the time I asked a few kids, it wasn’t received well. I dismissed the lack of participation to the conversation as being due to embarrassment, and finally stopped asking people.

  I realized, sitting at a traffic light, as it turned from green to red, that I was probably sitting there, zoned out, thinking of the time in my life that I harbored suicidal thoughts. As I waited for the light to turn green again, I thought of how many other people on the road must be zoning out. Not paying attention, and thinking of things that they should or shouldn’t be thinking about. Eventually, the light turned green, and I was back to driving. As I pulled into Cups, I didn’t see David’s car, but it didn’t surprise me, as he hadn’t texted me yet. Filled with excitement to tell David that he was heterosexual, I entered Cups.

  I loved the yogurt here, but the entire theme puzzled me. Cups was like a Hooters that sold frozen yogurt instead of chicken wings. The girls that worked here wore hoodies, unzipped, and their breasts hung out. In the summer, they shed their hoodies, and wore tank tops, and their breasts hung out. Great marketing, I suppose, because they were always busy.

  Kid and I had talked at length about what he called codependent women, women that sacrifice themselves, at almost any cost, for a relationship. I had learned that these women would do almost anything for a little attention and praise from a man. Are girls that work in atmospheres like this codependent? Are they working, half naked, for wages alone? Is it just another job? Or are they working half naked for wages while they hope to be noticed, sacrificing themselves and showing their bodies, in hopes of luring a man? The answers interested me and saddened me both. The thought of so many women on this earth knowingly sacrificing every bit of moral fiber that they should have, just to have someone give them attention and praise, is sad. I wanted to tell the girl behind the counter to zip up her hoodie, and go get a job at Barnes and Nobles.

  I got a cup, and prepared my yogurt. This was one place that I enjoyed treating myself to. Brianna and I come here quite frequently. I think I enjoy it far more than she does. In fact, I think she could care less where we go. She enjoys spending time with me, regardless of where we are spending it. I enjoy it here because it is a treat, a guilty pleasure. Almost like ice cream, without the calories. Maintaining a body I was comfortable with was a constant fight, and although my exercising and diet worked well, I was never quite satisfied with the results. After school, daily, I was at the gym, working frantically on some ridiculous machine. I attempted to shed calories, and in turn, shed size and weight. I didn’t necessarily have a target weight or size, but wanted to be comfortable in my own skin. I wasn’t there yet, but that goal was not missed from lack of exercise or proper diet. I looked at this place as a reward for all of my hard work.

  I took my yogurt cup to the register to get it weighed. Cloe was working at the register. Could anyone be skinnier with larger boobs? She looked good in a disproportionate kind of Barbie Doll way. Probably five foot seven, a hundred five or ten pounds, and boobs the size of grapefruits.

  “That will be $5.23, Michelle. Oh, and that David guy you have been talking to in here lately, is he your boyfriend? He is just freaking cute,” she said as she bent down to scratch her calf. When she did, one of her boobs literally fell out of the hoodie. Out. Like out, out. Out in the open. Are you kidding me? Maybe she didn’t belong at Barnes and Nobles. Looking at her gave me some odd form of satisfaction that I looked the way I did.

  “No, he’s just a close friend,” I said, as I reached into my purse. I wanted to point, and tell her that part of her was hanging there for the world to see. How could she not know? As she straightened her posture back to standing, her boob hung there, defying, to some degree, the very laws of gravity.

  “Well, he’s just adorable,” As she spoke, without looking, she reached down, cupped her boob in her hand, and stuffed it carefully back into her hoodie. She didn’t mention it, nor did she change her facial expression. Maybe this was something that happe
ned frequently, and I had just never had the opportunity to witness it. I graciously paid for my yogurt, and sat down, satisfied, at least for an evening, of who I was.

  I enjoyed being in public far more than being at home, and yearned to be in college, where I could be free. Free of my family. Free of relatives. Free of being bound to rules, regulations, and expectations. For the most part, I stayed in my room while I was at home, and I acted as though my family didn’t exist. I never saw them if I didn’t have to. I felt, for the first time in my life, that if I never saw them again, I would survive. Feeling like this, at least initially, was troubling. I had become comfortable lately with these feelings. I did have hope that after college, or during college, these feelings would change. I secretly hoped that I would develop a new fondness for my family while I was away. Either way, I had become comfortable living with these feelings, or having things change. I loved my family, and that would never change. I didn’t love being around them or spending time with them.

  In public, I was able to be myself, and didn’t worry about being judged, nor did I feel the need to meet the expectations of others. In public, no one had expectations of me. I was accepted by those around me for being who I was, and my actions were never questioned. Michelle, why did….Michelle, are you wearing makeup, Michelle what are you wearing, Michelle, what did you decide about your college, regarding…Michelle, what happened at school the other day, Michelle, you are spending too much money on…Michelle, do you really think you need to do… The knowing, the truly knowing, that I can be in the presence of others, and not be criticized, ridiculed, and/or questioned, regarding life and my way of living it, is priceless.