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I heard it. The pound of her footsteps, her sobs, the kind of sobs that come from the darkest place, a place where all of your hope is lost, the kind of sobs that as they exit your mouth they take a little bit of soul along with them. I heard her sobs, and the pounding as her feet hit the floor, one, two, one two, the loud and abrupt slam open and close of the bathroom stall door. I heard her vomiting.
“Oh my God. Oh my God.” It was all I could think for the first few seconds after I realized it was her.
She had her personnel Monday night…It was about everything that she did at the fraternity party the weekend before…Even though I wasn’t there I knew everything that had happened….That’s all anyone could talk about the entire week, how crazy it was, how crazy she was. I didn’t say anything against it, I never told people to stop talking about it, to cut her a break. She wasn’t a close friend of mine, she was an outsider really… why would I risk the entire sorority, my friends looking at me like I’m crazy, just for speaking up for her.
The weekend before Kristin had gone over to the fraternity house next door, to party, it was a Saturday night. She got too drunk again. After knowing her for a year now, it is evident that she has had and is still dealing with many emotional issues. She has taken them out by getting drunk and doing bad things before. Not like this though, everything she’s done in the past when she got wasted was just plain tacky. Whatever, I don’t care that’s her business, unlike most people I never really thought twice about the things she did. But this time it was different. Saturday night, Kristen was scary. She was so angry: Angry at the world, at the sorority, at something that I didn’t know about. But she took it out in her rage. She assaulted 2 of our sisters and a new girl, a couple of the fraternity guys, dented in the door of the fraternity house she was at, tore branches off of the magnolia tree in our front yard, turned over every table in the dining room, and demolished the living room.
YES, her behavior was scary (as a lot of the sisters pointed out), YES it was unreasonable, YES it was unacceptable, and NO, I did not think that she would walk out of that meeting still in possession of her pin……
……..but I had not anticipated her reaction. That was stupid of me really. How else would she react after finding out that she was no longer a member of an organization that meant so much to her. How would I feel? How would I feel walking into a room, and it suddenly going silent, and knowing that it was because everyone in it was just talking about me? How would I feel looking into the eyes of my sisters, my so-called friends and see their intense glares of disgust and dislike? How would I feel knowing that the people and the organization that meant so much to me, did not want me anymore?
I do know how I’d feel. I have felt it before. Last year I felt it, last semester when I was dealing with my own emotional issues, when I was trying to forget. When I was drunk more than I was sober. When I showed up at a ritual, after a full day of drinking, an act that disgraced a lot of the people I loved.
I remember their faces. I remember their hate. I remember feeling unwanted and ashamed. And mostly, as I sat there in the next room over, listening through the walls to Kristen sobbing and vomiting uncontrollably in the bathroom, I remember what those faces and those attitudes did to me, how they affected me.
And in those few short minutes Kristen was in the bathroom, I got scared. I began to shake and I began to cry. My past situation and her current one were so similar, and, I realized, so was our tendencies to behaving irrationally, her even more so than I.
It was in these minutes, out of fear for her and recollections of my own, that I saw myself and I saw her. I saw her acting out every bad thought that I had ever had thought about doing or that I did. I saw her popping out the screen of her window and jumping. I saw her getting in her car, with tears blurring her vision, and turning it sharply into the nearest tree. I saw her taking her pick from a number of ways out.
But the clearest picture of all. The one I saw with unimpeded clarity. I see her and I see me and I can see the silver glint of the blade as she brings it slow and hard across her skin. So slow and so hard that before she even removes it from her arm completely, a pool of angry red, stains the cool white linoleum floor.
I see these things as I listen to her sobs, they are wild and loud and uncontrollable. I blink hard, so I can forget, so I can get rid of these visions of her and of me. I don’t want to think these things. I don’t want to, but I do, and I remember the pain that she is feeling. The desperation, hopelessness, loss….
……all because of the silence that explodes in a room as soon as you enter it, all because of the glares and the expressions of hatred, all because the people and the organization that you care the most about in the entire world, don’t love you back.
I know this. I know these feelings. I know what they can do, what they did. And for this I am afraid. I am afraid for Kristen.
“Please, God, let her be okay.”
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Posted by she_smiles87 on 2007-12-18 01:43:45 | Rating: | Views: 137
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