Hypocrisy

I.

It was a night of balloons and 'Sweet Sixteen' streamers, pink glitter and roses, a live band pounding out dance music. Girls in tight satin party dresses and boys in suits mingled outside by the pool, drinking punch out of wine glasses under a dazzling star-lit night.  

You were there in a dark corner, your pained blue eyes looking so uncomfortable and lost - that I felt lost too when I saw them. Funny that before that moment, I'd never really noticed you at all, but your pain brought you into existence and I couldn't help but linger beside you.

"Do you ever feel like this isn't you?" you asked as the means to your introduction.
"It isn't," I admitted.

You nodded as if you already knew that, hand reaching up to swipe the black bangs from your eyes, shyness painted on your face as you looked away. I wanted you to look back. I didn't know very much about you, other than you were the son of one of my father's golf buddies and you'd gone to a public school.   

"Do you know anyone here?" I asked, looking over my guests.
"I know them all," you said darkly, "The mindless, privileged spawn of the damned."

I smiled when you said it, so brooding and dramatic, your lip curled slightly, the loathing in your words fully manifest in your predatory glare. I'd assumed myself excluded since you'd spoke it in my presence, like I was somehow above that estimation. It made me feel good.


II.

Freshman year at college I ran into you in a coffee house where open mic poetry was performed with a blinding passion, and you'd lifted your head when I walked in and watched me sit down. I gave you a fleeting smile and you rose and approached me at my table and took a seat as if you'd been invited.  

"This is kind of surreal," you mused.  
I narrowed my eyes. "Why's that?"

"I had just been thinking about the night I was at your party. I walked through your house and no one noticed. You had these little shell-shaped soaps in your bathroom...and I took one."

"You stole one of my soaps?"  

"Yeah." You smiled gently. "I just wanted a little piece of your life."
     
"I thought you weren't interested in my life."

"It wasn't your life I liked," you said intently, your eyes generating the power of the ocean as they washed me hard onto the shore, and I laid there wet and naked for a moment, dazed and gasping for breath.  


III.  

We lived together in your tiny apartment, which grew crowded with a collection of sleek, impressive electronics you'd purchased at my expense, and you'd call your friends with each new acquisition and list its specs and internet ratings to the point where it made me sick. And all my ideals and aspirations, you cut down and blamed on my upbringing, and you'd scream at me that I was stupid and blinded to the reality of life.

The night I left, my skin grew thick beneath a layer of dried out tears as I dragged my belongings out the door, my existence reduced to a single suitcase.  You followed behind me, taunting my growth, your words bouncing off a fresh built wall, insisting I was destined for nothing but failure in a world without you. And then you cried out my name in anguish and I remembered your initial pain and almost felt bad for a moment, but I kept on walking.

You raced inside and ran back out and threw that shell-shaped bathroom soap at my heart and I stopped and picked it up and put it in my pocket and smiled, happy to have a little piece of my life back.