If Only He Listened

You are perfect for being you. Believe in your uniqueness and talents. Is a hummingbird more perfect than an elephant? Perfect for what? Perfection is subjective, not objective. It is the same as a lock and key, the adventurer and the quest. So the only question you need to answer is that you are brave enough to walk your heaven-sent path? People can grow strong enough to whisper at the iron bars that hold them and see them bend out of their way like the craziest magic. That's what love can do: fix souls, fix brains, cure us all. Yet, some of us still choose to walk down a path of shame. 

They speak of lies as if they know the truth. Lies will build you a brain for deception and bar you from a full ability to love. If to lie is your default position, your brain is being mis-wired daily. Then, when you seek love and recall that truth is foundational to love, you will feel as if you are on the other side of a sheet of glass even though they try to reach you. The only way through, the only way back to the safety of love, is honesty, the kind that is raw and vulnerable. It is so easy to break a person, and it takes so very long to repair. This is the story of Zeke.

Guilt is the dance partner of greed in the grand theatre of emotional indifference. Zeke was an ordinary boy who lived quite a lavish life, at least, that's what he used to say to make us believe he had everything when really he had nothing. Not even the love of his own family. He felt like a ghost in a world of paper dolls. He was the ghost in his own machine. The spirit running through time and space, looking, always looking in the blackness for a sacred spark. I guess you could call him lonely, but he has learned how to lessen the pain over time. But despite that, he still isn't able to bring back what is now lost forever. Betrayal is a conscious choice for cold indifference, to take a personal gain instead of a loss that would have saved the other. The pathway into evil begins as small acts of cold-heartedness. Yet, as with any journey, those small steps become more significant as they add up. 

Once upon a time, I had what you could say an emotional bond or connection with Zeke. We used to be close. He was your average American high school boy who wasn't exactly the popular kind. He used to sit alone at lunch and never wanted to socialize. Something didn't seem right during the first few weeks after the spring break of 1994. He often used to cry in between classes and never showed any interest in learning. He was always sitting in the principal's office for something or another. So one day, desperately wanted to break his constant pattern, I decided to approach him. Who knew it would have been the biggest mistake of my life. 

I went over to the table next to the trash can; back then, we used to call it the "irrelevant corner" where only a bunch of nobodies sat. He seemed pretty uneasy at first but then later started to get comfortable around me. We gradually started talking and really hit it off. Everything seemed to be in place; I mean, that's what I thought. We talked about our families, and when I started to realize we have a lot of common grounds, that's where how our friendship began. Friendship is a love-nexus thing. It can't be bought or sold, yet earned with steady steps that build trust. Well, the proof of good friends is in the challenges of life. Those who pass such trials are your troupe, your running buddies, your real soul-mates, and Zeke was the literal definition of what I called a perfect friend. He became my ride or die. From there onwards, we did everything together, from numerous sleepovers to celebrating every birthday side by side. But it all started to run cold on the chilly evening of September, just a few days after summer vacations ended, and we all resumed back to school. 

I saw Zeke in the opposite end of the hallway as he was packing away his books in his locker. Well, I did what any person would do when he hasn't seen his friend in almost 2 months. I ran, shouting his name as it echoed in the narrow ends of our hallway. Just as I walked close to him, a group of guys surrounded me, with one of them giving me the deadliest stares. One of the most popular dudes in high school was Elijah Parkinson, the crush of every girl who walked by stood right next to Zeke.  

What was he doing there next to Zeke? I thought to myself that when I found out about how Zeke gained popularity within just 2 months? Kind of shocking to me, to be completely honest. How did the guy almost no one even knew existed, who used to eat lunch every day for a solid 5 months in the irrelevant corner, which every passing girl took advantage of just because he did their homework become such a top-notch? Like damn, I wanted to know the secret too. And it was then when I found out the dirty secret that led to his undeserved popularity, and it unravelled the twist.

Zeke had wholly transformed into an unrecognizable person and was there like a shadow until you needed him. Then suddenly, he was unavailable. His ready smile was only for those who gave freely and didn't require any help in return. Once the personal crisis was over, he'd re-emerge from the crowds and re-insert himself into the group, cracking the jokes everyone loved and indulging them in his favourite gossip of complete made-up lies. He knew the dirt on everyone, and if you weren't his buddy, he'd be free with that information to whoever his new friends were. With him or against him, it's how it was. But no one knew Zeke better than me. There was absolutely no relation to the lies he told everyone just to fit in versus what I really knew of him. The constant lies that deceived everyone stole Zeke from me, a piece at a time. Every week they pushed him slightly further until not only did he have no morals, he thought that way of thinking was desirable freedom. His family and me, who truly loved him, became his greatest enemy. Lies casually just slipped and blurted right off his tongue without hesitation. He thought it was the start of his life turning the way he always dreamed of, but boy was he so wrong; it was the start of a steep downhill pit of doom. Once everyone found out the real hidden truth that resided in these lies, they left him to rot. He lost all his so-called "friends," and his family never looked at him the same way again. 

Those painful memories are books with chapters, deep and horrible, so I leave them on the shelf to gather dust. I can pick them up if I need to learn something, to gain a perspective that helps me create my own good story. I can use them to re-see situations through the lens of their needs and traumas rather than mine. Today, tomorrow, and every tomorrow after to be wonderful; I want to choose what to write on those blank pages. I saw what lying did to Zeke. It landed him nowhere in life, and I promised myself that I would never speak of a lie ever again from there end on.