An apology

I should have tried to help.  But in life, “should” doesn’t fix anything.  All that’s important is that I didn’t do anything to stop it.

At times you consumed more of me than I did of myself.  We were both a bit crazy: floating off on our own random orbits, trying to find our suns.  Together we’d lose ourselves in each other and fall onto clouds made of our aspirations.  Every day we would fall even more deeply and hopelessly in a love of the most innocent variety.  Until you weren’t.  You were here one moment, and swept away by the desires of your darkness the next.

The reason that I did not help you so long ago can only be accredited to the senseless rage I felt towards you.  I should have fought for you, even though a part of me wished dearly for your misery.  I should have acknowledged that you were merely going through an unpleasant time and that one day I would regret hating you for it.  I should not have been so completely and utterly petty.  But like I said, “should” is meaningless.  “Should” fixes nothing.

We were similarly damaged; I finally see that after so many years.  Our tales and wishes were seemingly opposite, but underneath it all we were duplicates of each other.  We both longed for the loving hold of a parent.  With no better way to phrase this, you were wealthy and I was not.  Your family spent their time making more and more money, turning a blind shoulder to you as you shut yourself off to the affectionate army of nannies parading through your life.  I lived without a father and a mother too busy wrapped up in her own selfishness that she almost never looked at me once I was capable of taking care of myself.

I remember resenting you when we first met.  The idea of someone who seemingly had everything sent me into a fit of envy.  But I was an attentive child, and soon realized that you were no happier than I.  And so I talked to you for the first time in Mrs. Anderson’s 4th grade classroom, and as people often say, the rest was history.  And as you introduced me into the world of the rich and the fancy, of people working for you in your own house - something I had never even dreamed of - and of 5-star restaurants and beautiful pastries, I showed you the wonders of instant noodles, of making fun from next to nothing, and of the thrills felt running down busy city streets that you’d used to consider too dangerous to venture onto.

We continued on being wrapped up in each other’s world like this for years.  And my life seemed okay for that time.  But there was always that part of you that continuously pined for the attention of others.  And though I would revel in the idea of our downfall being because of your sudden interest in boys (occurring in the 8th grade), this only jump started what I had always known to be inevitable.

Bit by bit, you drifted from me and into the crowd of popularity.  It was a difficult time for me because you so blatantly ignored me.  I had always thought popularity to be something that only rewarded the uninteresting, and I knew that you never really liked it, which made everything so much worse.  You always had such a giddy smile on your face, but walked with saddened eyes.  People sometimes go a little crazy, and I figured that this was simply the case for you.  Your soul had fallen inwards in your tiny frame and became a big mess of broken things---broken priorities, broken bonds, and a broken heart.  You started drinking.  Experimenting with drugs.  Rumors spread of you having sex with boys you barely knew.  Your once-acceptable grades not only fell to the floor, but crashed right through it.  And I hated you for it.  All you wanted was love, I could tell that it’s all you were asking for, and I despised you for it.  Life stabbed you with a desperate emptiness, and you filled it in the easiest way.  I should have understood that, and I think on some level I did, but I knew that nobody else saw you in such a way.  And so I moved on.

I started a new life with new friends and new priorities and a new direction, to create a new page for myself in this big confusing world.  And after awhile I forgot about you enough that pangs of sadness would not flood through me every time I saw you.  I, as best as I could bear to, moved on with my life.  I went to my first choice college, while you continued to bathe in the wealth of your family, married while you went through a line of empty flings with pretty faces, and tried my best to find a purpose in life.  But you never left the back of my head.  Because I pitied you.  I pitied the fact that a person whom I knew had all the potential in the world had worn her life down to dust.

And so now, as I sit on my train reading the paper, my hands go cold as I find a picture of you plastered onto the page.  Your face lays next to an article about the shocking overdose at age 28 of one of the area’s biggest socialites.  Another picture depicts your cold bagged-up body being taken out of a hotel, brightened by the flash of a hundred cameras.  And I wonder.  I wonder if you being reduced to a smut article on a cheap piece of paper finally makes you feel noticed.