Regrets. We all have them. Those things in life we did that we wished we wouldn't have. Or in some cases those things in life we didn't do, that we wished we would have. Regardless of what they are, or how many we have of them, we all have them. One of mine is the way I treated a girl in school. Looking back, I was a real jerk to her. I shouldn't have been and I wish I could take it back.
It started in junior high. She said something to me in health class that really ticked me off. Rather than get her back and call it even or heaven forbid let it go, I decided to make an Everest out of a Wycheproff. I had been swatted with piece of toilet paper and decided the best way to retaliate was with an atom bomb. Being the writer I am, whit can come rather natural to me in times of need. When I want to, I can come up with the most clever of insults. I can tear someone apart with my words. My offense is vocabulary. Seeing that she wasn't as keen on using the English language as a weapon as I was, her itinerary plan was strictly physical. Punched, kicked, slapped, I think there was even a time she headbutted me.
Truth is, she was the one that tried to make peace. I can distinctly remember twice when she was the bigger person. The one who stuck out her hand and tried to end the war that she had never really wanted to start in the first place. In math class our teacher had finally had enough of our back and forth and demanded that we each say something nice about one another. To her credit, she came up to me and complimented me on the performance I had recently given in a play I had done in drama class. I responded to her that I couldn't think of anything nice to say about her but I'd appreciate it if she'd make something up and tell the math teacher that I did. The wind left my body, almost as quickly as she did, as her fist connected with my gut and she ran up to tell our math teacher that I had made out like George Thorogood, having done let the deal go down.
To be completely vulnerable I was terrified of her. Terrified of what I thought she might know and what she might do with that information. I was a depressed and unhappy teen. I'd like to at least pretend that I somewhat did a decent job of hiding it from the rest of the world. That I kept it well hidden. And maybe I did. Or maybe others just made me think that I did. Either way, she saw right through me, and it scared me to death. I hated that she knew how depressed I was. I hated it with such passion and the only way I knew how to deal with it was by being as cruel, cold and mean to her as I could be. My reasoning, although flawed was simple. She had discovered something about me that I wanted no one else to know. I figured that if I was malicious enough, I could turn her curiosity into disdain and she'd give up on her exploration.
With a tough exterior skeleton there is no way she would ever admit that anything I said ever got under her skin. I wasn't important enough to have ever had that much power.
As much of a prick as I was to her, two of my favorite high school memories involve her. There were two times during teenage years that she made me feel like a million bucks. Once, she even brought me to tears.
Creative Writing class, junior year of high school. On our last day of class we had to write a story, recapping our experience and what we got out of the class. I'll never forget what she said about me. "I can see myself one day in a Barnes and Noble, and on the shelf will be a best seller written by Stephen Stonebraker. Or maybe one day I'll go to a movie with my husband and kids, and written by Stephen Stonebraker will flash across the screen." Here was a girl, that essentially didn't even like me. Someone who on other grounds in other capacities thought of me as a loser. And yet here she was so confident in my ability and so sure of my talent that she came right out and said it. There are times when writing a novel or a screenplay, the thought of giving up often crosses my mind. I get so frustrated and angry that I haven't gotten anywhere yet. I feel like tossing my keyboard across the room, watching it smash into a thousand pieces and saying the Hell with it forever. Then I'll think of her and think to myself if she, someone who didn't even really care for me as a person had to admit how talented I was, then maybe someday someone else might too.
Monday February 16th, 2004 is a day that sticks out in my memory. On Saturday the 14th of February, 2004 I had placed third at the sectional tournament at WACO high school. In the state of Iowa, in order to qualify for districts you have to place first or second. One match. One match shy of qualifying. It was one of the worst days of my life. One of the worst feelings I've ever felt. I went into zombie mode and didn't even set my alarm clock Sunday night. For the past four years I had gotten up around 5:30 a.m. and got up to run three miles. On this particular Monday morning, I didn't even wake up until around 9:00.
When I got up, I was in no hurry to get to school. I lounged around the house and watched a little TV until the phone rang. I let it go to voicemail and listened as a school official left a message for my Dad asking where I was at. I deleted the message and went right back to watching T.V.
I don't know how my Dad found out but about an hour later, he came barging into the house yelling my name almost in a frantic scream that I can only describe as morbid. When he saw me sitting on the couch watching a rerun of The Andy Griffith Show he took a second before he said anything. What I needed at the time was a Dad to sit and talk to me about everything that I felt. To let me express myself and maybe make sense of all of the pain that made up every thought, feeling and emotion that I had. Instead, I was given a royal ass chewing, told to get in the shower and to get my ass to school.
When I got to school, I guess Randy Stonebraker wasn't the only one who thought that maybe I had decided to end it that day. There were a lot of people at school who were very careful with me that day. Treated me as if I were a fragile piece of glass, ready to break at the slightest wrong word. My English teacher even came right out and said it. Others thought it, but she was the only one to actually say to me that she worried that because I hadn't won that I might have killed myself.
I was numb. I began to wonder if losing out on this goal that I had worked so hard at for so long might have completely drained me of emotion. I had scared my Dad into leaving work, speeding home and worrying himself nearly to death that he'd find more just an open gun cabinet when he arrived home. I had sat on a couch, listening to him reprimand me. I came to school, heard my English teacher admit that she and others were worried that I had done something to myself. And I had seen my entrepreneurship teacher and my guidance counselor who had both taken me aside to let me know that they both wished things would have turned out differently for me. All of this, all of it, still left me without much feeling. It wasn't until psychology class, when I finally felt something again.
Somehow or another we got on the subject of me and there she sat, giving her opinion. She said that her and her family had learned that I had fell one match short of qualification and they talked about it for a bit over dinner that night. She said she remembered seeing me run all over town, always saw me in the mornings lifting weights or working on moves. Said I was the one of the hardest working people she had ever known and that she felt awful that things hadn't worked out for me.
A girl made me cry that day, and probably not for the reasons she would suspect. Yeah, it felt good to know that someone cared about what I was going through, but my tears were more so out of guilt and regret than they were anything else. If anything, here was someone that should have rejoiced in my failure. Someone who had every right to dance in victory upon my defeat. And yet for a reason I'll never understand, she did just the opposite. She poured her heart out to me that day and all I could do was sit and think about how much of a jackass I had been to her for all that time. She had no reason to, in fact she had every reason not to, but for some reason she gave a damn about what I was going through.
There's nothing sexual here, nothing intimate or romantic. It's nothing like that at all. Matter of fact, there's little to no chance that we would have ever have been friends. We're two different people. She's an extrovert. Popular and preppy. The type that adheres to all of societal expectations of fitting in. I'm an introvert. A loner who couldn't care less what others think. What it comes down to is this. No, we weren't ever going to be friends but we didn't need to be enemies either and it's my fault that we were.
I've since forgiven myself and life has gone on. It's not something I hold on to or something I let eat away at me or anything like that. It's simply something I thought of upon the opening statement, and something that if I had the chance to go back and redo, I would.
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