I still can't hate

Hate is a strong word. A really, really strong word. So I don’t think I can hate anyone. I think I would really be ashamed of myself if I ever said that I hated someone. Sure, I spew the words “I hate you!” on occasion, but I know that I never truly mean it.

I think I am too forgiving. People do things that are terrible to me. I end up letting it slide. Things that normal people would resent, I end up forgetting about.

That’s beside the point. Since I can’t really speak about people I “hate”, I will tell a little story about a girl I once knew. A girl that really hurt me badly.

When I first started high school, I hardly knew anyone. It was purely by luck that I chose to sit down at this one table in my 9th grade homeroom class. These girls ended up being my best friends. For the purpose of this blog, I will use initials: P, Z, Y, and S.

The 5 of us did everything together. We were stuck on each other like gum on a shoe. When one of us made a new friend, we all made a new friend. It’s kind of weird now that I think about it, but that is just how we used to be. We also told each other everything.

In our homeroom class was this good friend of mine from middle school, one of the only people I knew entering high school. He is A, and he was my closest guy friend at the time. No, we never had feelings for each other, if that’s where you think this blog is going.

So A eventually became really good friends with Z and Y over the course of the year. Eventually, A became a part of our “crew” of friends, if you will. We had an awesome friendship. We could joke about almost anything, and no one ever took it to heart. So one day, me and A decided it would be funny to pull a little prank…

We decided to fool everyone, and tell them that A had confessed his secret love to me one day, and without telling anyone, we started going out. We thought it was hilarious, but I guess Z, Y and P didn’t. They were mad at us, and spewed something about not being able to trust us.

When we told them it was a joke, Z and Y laughed it off, and life was good again. But P…P when ballistic on me. She was mad at me for days, and didn’t even speak to A for a while. I never really understood what made her so peeved. It took about a week, but things eventually cooled down.

A few months passed, and we were about halfway through our Sophomore Year. Our “Crew” expanded, and we used to sit around and lunch and…make more fun of each other. One of our little jokes was teasing P and A, saying they both were totally in love. When they did little things like sit down beside each other, or if one was looking in the general direction of the other, we would joke about their little “crushes”.

I am not sure what we did, but eventually, our teasing words got to A, and he began to develop feelings for P. We were ecstatic. What started as a joke turned into something real.

Eventually, A worked up the courage to let his feelings be known. He didn’t plan to ask P out, he just wanted her to know that he liked her. So everyone, included Z, Y, S and me, was shocked to find out that she returned the feelings.

Now think wrong of me. My dislike for P did not come from her not telling me about her crush. I was rather annoyed though. I thought that almost two years of friendship entailed people into telling their best friends about crushes. It is just a crush after all. And we later found out that this crush was not just recent. She had been hiding her feelings since the start of the 10th grade back in September. Their confessions didn’t happen till May.

I got over my anger in about a weekend, and soon the two became an official couple. Since both of them were already friends with all of us, we never imagined how it would affect our friendship. Its not either of them had to ditch their friends to hang out with the other and their friends. We were all one group. But slowly, they began to drift away and hang out alone.

I never hated that. I mean, couples need their alone time. I get that much. But soon, they were never around. And I missed them. One of them was one of my best friends, and the other was like a brother to me.

We would go the movies as a group, and they would either talk through the entire thing, or make out right beside me. We went to the park, and they would disappear for 2 hours on a bike to go behind a tree.

Eventually, they stopped hanging out with us outside of school too. They always had their own plans. We were always courteous enough to call them anyways, just in case they wanted to hang out. One time, P had the nerve to lie to me about not being allowed to go. I would get home, and A would told about how much fun the two of them had on their date. That’s when things got iffy.

I didn’t see the need for anyone to lie to me. I can’t stand a liar. I would rather someone tell me the truth that hurts me than tell a lie to please me. Because when I found out my friend lied to me… I was pissed. Freaking pissed.

We started to have talks with P. “Talks”. We would tell her that we understood she wanted to hang out with her boyfriend, but that she couldn’t just forget her friends. And she always assured us that she would try to find a balance. That she would do things with us again.

More fucking lies.

And pretty soon, things just kept getting worse. A began to have a real problem with Z. He somehow thought that Z was being selfish, and was deliberately trying to ruin their relationship. They stopped talking to each other right then and there.

Me and Y were still friends with A though. We somehow thought that things would get better. Boy, were we wrong.

We started to find that A knew things about us that we didn’t want him to know. I mean, we were friends, but he started to know personal details. Things that only Z, P Y and S knew. Things only they were supposed to know.

We confronted P about it with another private “talk”. She said they as her boyfriend, she felt entitled to tell him everything. She can tell him all she wants about herself, but don’t you dare fucking tell my secrets for me. We got a promise from her to stop telling him things, and to not even tell him about the private talks we had, because the things we talk about are not things other need to know.

I get home, and who should message me but A. The message read:

“Hey, so I heard about your lil talk today.”

Oh my freaking lord. What did we just freaking tell you not to do.

So eventually, I stopped trusting her. I told her less and less things, and distanced myself from her. I wasn’t going to sit and cry to her anymore about how our friendship was deteriorating. I still tried to do nice things to her. But somehow, she always did something that made me mad.

What really hurt me was on her 17th birthday. Me, Z and Y decided to do something nice, and surprise her at school by decorating her locker with balloons and a card. Our plan sort of backfired, because she came to school early that day with A, and caught us in the act. Instead of being happy or shocked, she came to us and said “You guys shouldn’t have done this. You don’t need to prove to anyone that you are good friends.”

Prove that we are good friends? We weren’t going to give you a birthday surprise to let other people know we are nice. We did it because we wanted to just do something nice for her. A friend.

So I went and ripped off the wrapping paper, threw it into my locker, and left.

And that day, I sat down and thought about everything that happened over the course of 3 years. Somehow through all of this, my parents and my other friends think that Z, Y, S and I were the bad ones. When I told my mother that I did not hang out with P anymore, she said to me “Why do you have to be so mean?” My friends ask me why I completely shut P out of my life.

Here’s why:

She hid things from me, she lied to me, she told my secrets to people that I didn’t want knowing them, and she showed me just how much how she valued our friendship. She threw away every other relationship so that she could permanently glue herself to A’s hip.

And that is why She is the person that I dislike the most.

Somehow, through 2 years of being a total bitch, I can’t bring myself to hate her.