Little Rosa, The Boys Let Her Know, She's Just Not That Way, She Don't Put On A Show, For Nobody, Not Even You, She's Gonna Sit Alone
--"Little Rosa (Live)", Letters to Cleo
I've never been the root cause of any great tragedies. I've never started any fires bigger than a bonfire. I've never blown up any dynamite to cause any sizable cave-ins. I've never threatened to release any vials of anthrax into a crowded hospital. Taken as a whole, I've never taken action that would cause a sizable portion of society any long-lasting harm. I'm just not that type of person; I don't harbor this immense hatred for the world. But that doesn't mean I haven't been at fault for spreading misery into people's lives--far from it. I know there's been more than a few individuals who could claim to have been worse off for ever having met me just as I know there's been more than few individuals who I've chased away by often-times caustic behavior.
No avalanches. No floods. Nothing like that. Just a long list of people I've wronged irrevocably and often without any sense of remorse at the time.
It goes without saying that the people one hurts the most are the people one sees most often. My relationship with my family often times reads like a horror novel, filled with crazy instances where I just didn't care enough to even want to see them when they were ill, in some great misfortune, or even dying. And my friends? I'm fairly sure each of them can point to a time or two where I put what I wanted far ahead of what the group wanted. If not that, I would be confident they could recite an anecdote where I let my temper get the best of me, acted out in public for no apparent reason but that I lacked the proper social skills to effectively communicate my displeasure or frustration at the situation before me. My history is filled with many an anecdote, sometimes funny and sometimes not, where I lost all grip of proper manners and did whatever seemed most likely to get me what I wanted at the time. I've hurt a lot of people for a lot of different reason a lot of different times.
But no one's life have I ever fucked up more than Breanne's. Without a doubt.
Forget all the bad advice I've given her over the years--I've stumbled upon as many good suggestions as I've passed along bad ones. Forget the whole being one hundred percent of the reason she and her cousin Shelly do not converse any more--that's as much her cousin's problem as it is me. Forget even the whole almost getting her pregnant scare--that was a whole other headache that thankfully never actually came to fruition. For the most part I've made her life more complicated or tortured than it ever had to be. That's the truth right there. I have never so overtly made a total catastrophe of one's life as I have of Mrs. Breanne Haley Holins-Meier. The more I reflect upon it, the more I realize it's true. That has a lot more to do with a few factors than anything else. It's not like I set about to screw up her life the first day I met her. It was never my intention to do my worst to her or to cause her any pain. I don't think that's anyone's intentions when they first conspire to become friends with someone. When I first met her I thought she was going to be the one I couldn't screw up because it didn't feel like I had to try so hard to impress her or to win her over. She made my life so much easier than I ever thought it could be. Words flowed naturally, wanting to be helpful and decent wasn't a struggle with her, and she quite literally brought out the best in me. For awhile there, it seemed that I had found the most elusive of all relationships, the stress-free best friend, that person that improved your life in all respects without taking anything else away.
The trouble started when I realized just how accommodating she really was. I don't know what it is about me. I don't know why I can't ever leave people's good intentions alone. Maybe it's the opportunist in me, maybe it's all those novels and films I read about con artists or grifters. But for some reason I always have to test the limits of someone's affections. I did it with my parents, testing my boundaries of just how much freedom they would allow me and then taking one step further. I did it with DeAnn just recently. To some extent, I do it with everyone. But never worse than I ever did it with Miss Lucy.
It started innocently at first. I took advantage of the fact she was so much younger than me at the time. I would ask her for small favors here and there--buying me a book that supposedly was sold out at the bookstore I worked at even though it wasn't, making her wake up at odd hours because I supposedly couldn't get to the phone any other time, &c...--all for the sake of ascertaining whether or not she would do it. These requests weren't like one friend asking another friend for a favor; they more closely resembled an older brother asking his sister to fetch him this or that. And she did them, not out of any sense of knowledge that she was doing something I couldn't do for myself or out of a sense that she was helping me out of a jam, but because she wanted to please me in the same way kids have always been trying to please the kids a year or two ahead of them in school. She was willing to trade minor inconveniences at a misguided attempt to win my respect. My respect she had. It's just that I wanted more. I know this is the way people have dealing with other people since time immortal, buying them things or doing things to please them, but it's usually not the way things work between equals. That's the theory I always sold to both of us when we began this little partnership of ours, that we were equals. Sure, there was a four-and-a-half years age difference, but I always told her that it didn't make it difference. I always told her as far as I was concerned she was just like the young women I'd gone to class with, that she was just like my cousins who'd I always known, that she was just like the twin sister I should have had.
But that wasn't true. I may have talked at her like someone who wanted to be fifty-fifty partners, but I treated her like I was running a game on her. I treated her like she was the mark in some long-term scam that she had no idea about. From there it just grew worse. You can't really respect someone that you think is more naive than you. It doesn't make for a fair fight. While I never came right out and said that she was being gullible, there were plenty of times where I thought it. Not only that, there were plenty of times where I truly thought less of her because she couldn't see through my flattery to what I really wanted underneath. And while I never went so far as to ask for something she truly wasn't ready to give, I know for sure there were plenty of times I talked her into giving something that she knew I was going to ask about. They were physical objects, per se, but more words and admissions. It doesn't sound like much, but in any contest of wills there's going to be prizes one person does not wish to relinquish. It doesn't even matter what the prize is, the contest is always about holding onto those objects you wish to retain and getting others to let go of the things they wanted to keep. Words function just as well as books or letters or money. If I wanted her to say something, it always become a goal of mine to get her to say them before long.
Yes, there were a lot of things she asked me to do that I did willingly. And, yes, quite a few of them I had my doubts about. But the difference was she thought it was going against my nature to break the rules or even break the law when that's never been a big deal for me. So, yeah, technically buying that bottle of bourbon during my first visit to her during Christmas was against the law but it was never this huge sacrifice I was making for her. It wasn't like the time I held that zip-loc bag full of pot for Carly at the L.A. Weekly show a few years ago. That I could have been arrested for. But breaking the law so I could get Breanne drunk was never going to get me into any real trouble so it never felt like she was gaming me. And, yeah, over the years I've bought her some nice baubles (a necklace, a watch there) and I did treat her to a trip to Chicago, but, again it never felt like her pulling the wool over my eyes. It never felt like her using my obvious affection for her to suss out gifts and prizes galore. Most of the things she's asked me for I've been more than willing to give freely because I honestly do love her, whereas there has been times where I feel she truly didn't want to do something but that I won her over.
That's the main difference between us, I've won her over here and there over the years. But she? She only asks of me the stuff I was going to do anyway. At least that's the way it feels to me.
About the only thing I couldn't give her when she asked of it was my desire to be a couple. I held back on that for forever. It felt weird saying, "I love you," only to follow it up with, "now hurry along to high school, B." That's another reason why I liked the coupling of Ephram and Madison on Everwood, because it so closely mirrored the trials I had endured it. The insecurity, the hesitation, the plain confusion--I've been through all of that and more with her. But that's where I think treated her the most unfairly for the longest time.
I mean--she had made it pretty clear she was falling for me about six months after getting to know me. Chalk it up to the fact that I was older or maybe to the fact that, like she says, I was the first person that ever really heard her. Whatever I did I was glad I managed to somehow get that part right. I'm nothing without her faith in me compared to what I'm like with it. Yet I was always pussyfooting around how exactly I felt about her. It's not without a bit of sarcasm that I tell people that she's like my best friend, little sister, then ex-girlfriend all rolled into one because for the longest time the first two monikers were the only two I could allow myself to focus on. A best friend I could handle. I'd had a couple of best friends before her. A little sister was a new experience because the closest I'd ever come to that was a couple of younger cousins. They've never resembled in the least the frustration and the joy associated over watching someone younger than you that feels like family. Yes, there's Francis, but, at only two years younger than me, he never really felt like he needed taking care of. Breanne was different. When she was going through the last few years of running away I was actually in a position to give her brotherly advice. And when she needed assistance dealing with her parents regarding this or that, I could actually give her anecdotes about how I handled that selfsame conversation with my parents.
But love? Real romantic love? That was something that was seventeen worlds of scary. I'd never been in love like that before. I'd thought it had been something close when I had met and was talking with Jina, but I'd been wrong. And to possess that depth of feelings for someone who was so much younger and so much more innocent than me felt like I was living on another planet. Nobody knows what it's like to care about someone passionately until it happens and that's what it was like for me. I was apprehensive about the manner in which my emotions snuck up on me. For the longest times--I say months, she says years--I didn't act appropriately upon them. Meanwhile, there she was, ducking the advances of guys her own age, making up excuses to her friends and family about why she wasn't dating more. She was basically saving herself for me and I was too blind, too proud, to realize it. If I considered how many nights she forsook because of my dumb ass's hesitation, staying at home alone just so we could talk, it makes me wish she hadn't wasted so much of her formative years on me. It makes me feel bad that, of anyone she's ever known, I was the one who held her back the most in that regard. At what--fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen--she should have been getting to know what kind of guy she was attracted to and not settling for me.
It does strengthen her case that we did end up dating for a few years there. It makes me recognize that she saw something between the two of us for at least a year before I ever saw it clearly. Yet she could have been gaining some real-life experience in those months she was waiting for me to come around. Instead, I felt like she was holding back for me... when that was one area of her life I expressly did not ask for or try to trick her into.
She is my first love and I suppose I'm hers. But I never asked for that. I would have been well content to see her date other people while I sorted out how I felt in the mean time. In fact, I believe it was all that pressure knowing that she was stalling for a decision that made me deliberate even longer. It's a delicate matter, having someone claim you as the first person they've ever fallen for. It puts a lot of pressure on you to make it special for them. That's the part I was frightful of. That's the part I balked at. I didn't want to be the first person in line that everyone else gets measure against. I wanted to be the person that she finally saw for what I was, after she's been through all the jerks first. Everyone knows in the romantic comedy the heroine always starts with the person they're not supposed to end up with; I didn't want that schmuck to be me... even though that's exactly what ended up happening.
So, let's see, I've been manipulative with her and I wasted the best years of her life. What else did I do to totally mangle the way her life?
Oh yes, I didn't show up at her wedding even though she expressly told me I was one of only four people (Greg and her parents being the other three) she needed to be there. At the time I thought I was doing her a favor. I thought I would be more disruptive than anything else. I didn't think, though. I didn't think at all. The simple fact of the matter is this: when your younger sister gets married, you don't tell her, "I've got better things to do." You don't tell your best friend that you can't make her wedding because you're not man enough to cause a scene. Worse than the eight months of not speaking to one another (which is part of the reason I started this blog in the first place), worse than the berating I got from her parents and from mine about how much I disappointed her, worse even than the hollowness of having missed out on possibly Breanne's biggest shining moment, is the knowledge that I wrecked her wedding. i might not have derailed it, but I made it that much less perfect by my absence. I'm sure, at the very least, it was a distraction that she didn't need and, at worst, it was the one glaring imperfection on her otherwise perfect day. That's what I mean by ruining it. It's funny, by not wanting to be the one guy who took the attention away from the happy couple, that's exactly what I did.
It's probably the most unforgivable decision I've ever made. And I'm still making up for it. From begging her to join this blog, to taking it whenever she brings it up without comment or defense, to plain apologizing every time it comes up in conversation--I cannot do enough to show how sorry I am for causing her that level of pain. I thought she'd get over it. Maybe she has. But the worst part about it is that I still haven't. It'll be seven years to the day in a few days, but I constantly ruminate over how it could have turned out differently if only I had showed some maturity, if only I had learned my lesson about respecting her wishes and her concerns more. I constantly play back how the conversation might have been less abrasive and how I could have just stepped onto the plane that was waiting for me. I constantly imagine the tears, the yelling, and the whatever that must have followed in the days following her hanging up on me. I also start to picture how long it took for her to even work up the forgiveness to start taking my calls again because the gods only know that, if it had been me, I would have never forgive her. I might have walked away from her over something like that--ten years of friendship thrown away.
That's the biggest motif when it comes to mistakes regarding Breanne. I always seem to go astray when it comes to taking her feelings seriously, when it comes to treating her with the same level of respect she's always shown me. It may be close to sixteen years after I first laid eyes on the name of Breanne Holins on Prodigy all those years back but I still treat her like the eager-to-please young girl she was back then. I still expect her to fetch and follow me when I so ask of her and for her to be okay when I say no to her. And that isn't fair. All she's ever asked of me is to care about her and not treat her feelings as second-rate. She had enough of that growing up with her mother. Yet, time and time again, when it comes to following this simple request, I undervalue her and I plow right ahead with what I wanted to do. I take her for granted because I still feel like I know better than her because I have been living four-and-a-half years longer than her.
I think it's time to see that she's more than caught up to me in terms of her understanding of the world and her experience at most everything. I think it's time to see, if anything, she's surpassed me in terms of blossoming into a well-rounded woman of rare character and intelligence. I think it's time to stop inadvertently hurting her in the name of mentoring her.
I've made some mistakes with her in the past--more than I'd care to remember. The only mistake I haven't made yet is totally driving her away because that would be the real mistake. Losing her from my life is the only real tragedy I could ever think of.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
I've never been the root cause of any great tragedies. I've never started any fires bigger than a bonfire. I've never blown up any dynamite to cause any sizable cave-ins. I've never threatened to release any vials of anthrax into a crowded hospital. Taken as a whole, I've never taken action that would cause a sizable portion of society any long-lasting harm. I'm just not that type of person; I don't harbor this immense hatred for the world. But that doesn't mean I haven't been at fault for spreading misery into people's lives--far from it. I know there's been more than a few individuals who could claim to have been worse off for ever having met me just as I know there's been more than few individuals who I've chased away by often-times caustic behavior.No avalanches. No floods. Nothing like that. Just a long list of people I've wronged irrevocably and often without any sense of remorse at the time.
It goes without saying that the people one hurts the most are the people one sees most often. My relationship with my family often times reads like a horror novel, filled with crazy instances where I just didn't care enough to even want to see them when they were ill, in some great misfortune, or even dying. And my friends? I'm fairly sure each of them can point to a time or two where I put what I wanted far ahead of what the group wanted. If not that, I would be confident they could recite an anecdote where I let my temper get the best of me, acted out in public for no apparent reason but that I lacked the proper social skills to effectively communicate my displeasure or frustration at the situation before me. My history is filled with many an anecdote, sometimes funny and sometimes not, where I lost all grip of proper manners and did whatever seemed most likely to get me what I wanted at the time. I've hurt a lot of people for a lot of different reason a lot of different times.
But no one's life have I ever fucked up more than Breanne's. Without a doubt.
Forget all the bad advice I've given her over the years--I've stumbled upon as many good suggestions as I've passed along bad ones. Forget the whole being one hundred percent of the reason she and her cousin Shelly do not converse any more--that's as much her cousin's problem as it is me. Forget even the whole almost getting her pregnant scare--that was a whole other headache that thankfully never actually came to fruition. For the most part I've made her life more complicated or tortured than it ever had to be. That's the truth right there. I have never so overtly made a total catastrophe of one's life as I have of Mrs. Breanne Haley Holins-Meier. The more I reflect upon it, the more I realize it's true. That has a lot more to do with a few factors than anything else. It's not like I set about to screw up her life the first day I met her. It was never my intention to do my worst to her or to cause her any pain. I don't think that's anyone's intentions when they first conspire to become friends with someone. When I first met her I thought she was going to be the one I couldn't screw up because it didn't feel like I had to try so hard to impress her or to win her over. She made my life so much easier than I ever thought it could be. Words flowed naturally, wanting to be helpful and decent wasn't a struggle with her, and she quite literally brought out the best in me. For awhile there, it seemed that I had found the most elusive of all relationships, the stress-free best friend, that person that improved your life in all respects without taking anything else away.
The trouble started when I realized just how accommodating she really was. I don't know what it is about me. I don't know why I can't ever leave people's good intentions alone. Maybe it's the opportunist in me, maybe it's all those novels and films I read about con artists or grifters. But for some reason I always have to test the limits of someone's affections. I did it with my parents, testing my boundaries of just how much freedom they would allow me and then taking one step further. I did it with DeAnn just recently. To some extent, I do it with everyone. But never worse than I ever did it with Miss Lucy.
It started innocently at first. I took advantage of the fact she was so much younger than me at the time. I would ask her for small favors here and there--buying me a book that supposedly was sold out at the bookstore I worked at even though it wasn't, making her wake up at odd hours because I supposedly couldn't get to the phone any other time, &c...--all for the sake of ascertaining whether or not she would do it. These requests weren't like one friend asking another friend for a favor; they more closely resembled an older brother asking his sister to fetch him this or that. And she did them, not out of any sense of knowledge that she was doing something I couldn't do for myself or out of a sense that she was helping me out of a jam, but because she wanted to please me in the same way kids have always been trying to please the kids a year or two ahead of them in school. She was willing to trade minor inconveniences at a misguided attempt to win my respect. My respect she had. It's just that I wanted more. I know this is the way people have dealing with other people since time immortal, buying them things or doing things to please them, but it's usually not the way things work between equals. That's the theory I always sold to both of us when we began this little partnership of ours, that we were equals. Sure, there was a four-and-a-half years age difference, but I always told her that it didn't make it difference. I always told her as far as I was concerned she was just like the young women I'd gone to class with, that she was just like my cousins who'd I always known, that she was just like the twin sister I should have had.
But that wasn't true. I may have talked at her like someone who wanted to be fifty-fifty partners, but I treated her like I was running a game on her. I treated her like she was the mark in some long-term scam that she had no idea about. From there it just grew worse. You can't really respect someone that you think is more naive than you. It doesn't make for a fair fight. While I never came right out and said that she was being gullible, there were plenty of times where I thought it. Not only that, there were plenty of times where I truly thought less of her because she couldn't see through my flattery to what I really wanted underneath. And while I never went so far as to ask for something she truly wasn't ready to give, I know for sure there were plenty of times I talked her into giving something that she knew I was going to ask about. They were physical objects, per se, but more words and admissions. It doesn't sound like much, but in any contest of wills there's going to be prizes one person does not wish to relinquish. It doesn't even matter what the prize is, the contest is always about holding onto those objects you wish to retain and getting others to let go of the things they wanted to keep. Words function just as well as books or letters or money. If I wanted her to say something, it always become a goal of mine to get her to say them before long.
Yes, there were a lot of things she asked me to do that I did willingly. And, yes, quite a few of them I had my doubts about. But the difference was she thought it was going against my nature to break the rules or even break the law when that's never been a big deal for me. So, yeah, technically buying that bottle of bourbon during my first visit to her during Christmas was against the law but it was never this huge sacrifice I was making for her. It wasn't like the time I held that zip-loc bag full of pot for Carly at the L.A. Weekly show a few years ago. That I could have been arrested for. But breaking the law so I could get Breanne drunk was never going to get me into any real trouble so it never felt like she was gaming me. And, yeah, over the years I've bought her some nice baubles (a necklace, a watch there) and I did treat her to a trip to Chicago, but, again it never felt like her pulling the wool over my eyes. It never felt like her using my obvious affection for her to suss out gifts and prizes galore. Most of the things she's asked me for I've been more than willing to give freely because I honestly do love her, whereas there has been times where I feel she truly didn't want to do something but that I won her over.
That's the main difference between us, I've won her over here and there over the years. But she? She only asks of me the stuff I was going to do anyway. At least that's the way it feels to me.
About the only thing I couldn't give her when she asked of it was my desire to be a couple. I held back on that for forever. It felt weird saying, "I love you," only to follow it up with, "now hurry along to high school, B." That's another reason why I liked the coupling of Ephram and Madison on Everwood, because it so closely mirrored the trials I had endured it. The insecurity, the hesitation, the plain confusion--I've been through all of that and more with her. But that's where I think treated her the most unfairly for the longest time.
I mean--she had made it pretty clear she was falling for me about six months after getting to know me. Chalk it up to the fact that I was older or maybe to the fact that, like she says, I was the first person that ever really heard her. Whatever I did I was glad I managed to somehow get that part right. I'm nothing without her faith in me compared to what I'm like with it. Yet I was always pussyfooting around how exactly I felt about her. It's not without a bit of sarcasm that I tell people that she's like my best friend, little sister, then ex-girlfriend all rolled into one because for the longest time the first two monikers were the only two I could allow myself to focus on. A best friend I could handle. I'd had a couple of best friends before her. A little sister was a new experience because the closest I'd ever come to that was a couple of younger cousins. They've never resembled in the least the frustration and the joy associated over watching someone younger than you that feels like family. Yes, there's Francis, but, at only two years younger than me, he never really felt like he needed taking care of. Breanne was different. When she was going through the last few years of running away I was actually in a position to give her brotherly advice. And when she needed assistance dealing with her parents regarding this or that, I could actually give her anecdotes about how I handled that selfsame conversation with my parents.
But love? Real romantic love? That was something that was seventeen worlds of scary. I'd never been in love like that before. I'd thought it had been something close when I had met and was talking with Jina, but I'd been wrong. And to possess that depth of feelings for someone who was so much younger and so much more innocent than me felt like I was living on another planet. Nobody knows what it's like to care about someone passionately until it happens and that's what it was like for me. I was apprehensive about the manner in which my emotions snuck up on me. For the longest times--I say months, she says years--I didn't act appropriately upon them. Meanwhile, there she was, ducking the advances of guys her own age, making up excuses to her friends and family about why she wasn't dating more. She was basically saving herself for me and I was too blind, too proud, to realize it. If I considered how many nights she forsook because of my dumb ass's hesitation, staying at home alone just so we could talk, it makes me wish she hadn't wasted so much of her formative years on me. It makes me feel bad that, of anyone she's ever known, I was the one who held her back the most in that regard. At what--fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen--she should have been getting to know what kind of guy she was attracted to and not settling for me.
It does strengthen her case that we did end up dating for a few years there. It makes me recognize that she saw something between the two of us for at least a year before I ever saw it clearly. Yet she could have been gaining some real-life experience in those months she was waiting for me to come around. Instead, I felt like she was holding back for me... when that was one area of her life I expressly did not ask for or try to trick her into.
She is my first love and I suppose I'm hers. But I never asked for that. I would have been well content to see her date other people while I sorted out how I felt in the mean time. In fact, I believe it was all that pressure knowing that she was stalling for a decision that made me deliberate even longer. It's a delicate matter, having someone claim you as the first person they've ever fallen for. It puts a lot of pressure on you to make it special for them. That's the part I was frightful of. That's the part I balked at. I didn't want to be the first person in line that everyone else gets measure against. I wanted to be the person that she finally saw for what I was, after she's been through all the jerks first. Everyone knows in the romantic comedy the heroine always starts with the person they're not supposed to end up with; I didn't want that schmuck to be me... even though that's exactly what ended up happening.
So, let's see, I've been manipulative with her and I wasted the best years of her life. What else did I do to totally mangle the way her life?
Oh yes, I didn't show up at her wedding even though she expressly told me I was one of only four people (Greg and her parents being the other three) she needed to be there. At the time I thought I was doing her a favor. I thought I would be more disruptive than anything else. I didn't think, though. I didn't think at all. The simple fact of the matter is this: when your younger sister gets married, you don't tell her, "I've got better things to do." You don't tell your best friend that you can't make her wedding because you're not man enough to cause a scene. Worse than the eight months of not speaking to one another (which is part of the reason I started this blog in the first place), worse than the berating I got from her parents and from mine about how much I disappointed her, worse even than the hollowness of having missed out on possibly Breanne's biggest shining moment, is the knowledge that I wrecked her wedding. i might not have derailed it, but I made it that much less perfect by my absence. I'm sure, at the very least, it was a distraction that she didn't need and, at worst, it was the one glaring imperfection on her otherwise perfect day. That's what I mean by ruining it. It's funny, by not wanting to be the one guy who took the attention away from the happy couple, that's exactly what I did.
It's probably the most unforgivable decision I've ever made. And I'm still making up for it. From begging her to join this blog, to taking it whenever she brings it up without comment or defense, to plain apologizing every time it comes up in conversation--I cannot do enough to show how sorry I am for causing her that level of pain. I thought she'd get over it. Maybe she has. But the worst part about it is that I still haven't. It'll be seven years to the day in a few days, but I constantly ruminate over how it could have turned out differently if only I had showed some maturity, if only I had learned my lesson about respecting her wishes and her concerns more. I constantly play back how the conversation might have been less abrasive and how I could have just stepped onto the plane that was waiting for me. I constantly imagine the tears, the yelling, and the whatever that must have followed in the days following her hanging up on me. I also start to picture how long it took for her to even work up the forgiveness to start taking my calls again because the gods only know that, if it had been me, I would have never forgive her. I might have walked away from her over something like that--ten years of friendship thrown away.
That's the biggest motif when it comes to mistakes regarding Breanne. I always seem to go astray when it comes to taking her feelings seriously, when it comes to treating her with the same level of respect she's always shown me. It may be close to sixteen years after I first laid eyes on the name of Breanne Holins on Prodigy all those years back but I still treat her like the eager-to-please young girl she was back then. I still expect her to fetch and follow me when I so ask of her and for her to be okay when I say no to her. And that isn't fair. All she's ever asked of me is to care about her and not treat her feelings as second-rate. She had enough of that growing up with her mother. Yet, time and time again, when it comes to following this simple request, I undervalue her and I plow right ahead with what I wanted to do. I take her for granted because I still feel like I know better than her because I have been living four-and-a-half years longer than her.
I think it's time to see that she's more than caught up to me in terms of her understanding of the world and her experience at most everything. I think it's time to see, if anything, she's surpassed me in terms of blossoming into a well-rounded woman of rare character and intelligence. I think it's time to stop inadvertently hurting her in the name of mentoring her.
I've made some mistakes with her in the past--more than I'd care to remember. The only mistake I haven't made yet is totally driving her away because that would be the real mistake. Losing her from my life is the only real tragedy I could ever think of.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
Labels: Breanne, consequences, influence, Letters to Cleo, Mistakes
posted by mojo shivers @ 12:37 AM
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