Day 373: 5 Minute Freewrite: Sunday - Prompt: hate
I don’t hate you.
You flatter yourself, imagining that I hate you.
That would imply I felt anything for you at all.
I am merely indifferent to you.
Love/Hate
relationships are a popular theme in fiction, and a very fine line separates the two apparently opposite emotions.
There is a worse thing for someone to feel (or not), as I found out at a very tender stage in life.
At Seventeen,
I graduated half a year early from high school and started college in January. I’d never before felt “at home” with others, least of all my own family. For the first time in my life, I discovered people who were like me. No longer was I a freak among normal people. Indeed, the 23-year-old grad student I met, Thad, told me I had a “spark of perception” that set me apart from the normal majority. Thad was a history major, fluent in German, with knife-edge cheekbones, sandy hair, wire glasses, and a hardness about him that I could hardly describe or define, but he was flinty and lean and kinda mean.
He’d read Machiavelli and was himself a sort of Prince, in my young eyes. Being so brilliant, Thad espoused the Machiavellian idea of a meritocracy of intellectual elites ruling the ignorant masses. But that wasn’t what I admired about him. He was funny! And he paid attention to me!
Every morning I’d head to the student union and find him at “his” table. He once said he was "addicted" to my company. I was hooked on his, but I was so obtuse, I read nothing more into it than that.
Others would come and go from the table. I was in awe of the quick exchanges of rapier wits. I’d never laughed so hard, so often. The daily camaraderie, the familiar characters coming and going, the jokes, the college dialogues: it was like those sitcoms, "Friends," "Big-Bang Theory," and I'd never known such happiness.
There were signs that Thad was not a nice person. His atheism was not, and would never be for me, a “red flag waving” because so many of my friends, to this day, are atheists and agnostics, and believers of various persuasions. One reason I felt at home with college students was that I finally could dare to say--out loud!--that the Bible made no sense--and not only was I unpunished, but others agreed with me!
I had found like-minded thinkers. It was Thad who pointed out to me the difference between amoral and immoral, and at the time, I agreed with him that "amoral" could be a good thing.
Being godless wasn’t the problem with Thad.
The “red flags waving”
were things he’d say and do that, in hindsight, should have had me fleeing as fast and far as I could. He made fun of people behind their backs; I would say I hated to think what he said about me when I left the table. There were other things, like that petty act of vandalism, cementing the locks of Andy's car because Andy had forty dollars to waste on a leather bird during their study abroad in Germany. (This was long before I entered the scene, and I never did meet Andy.) Thad was arrested and "released on his own recognizance," he said. "I didn't know I had any."
I was often the last to discern when he was just kidding, but I came to know all too well that the truth is often spoken in jest.
Today I can recognize his kind. Back then, I had never known a brilliant and dynamic character like Thad, and for him to take notice of me, trivial little me, was stupendous.
From Day One, I was infatuated with Thad's roommate, Kyle. He was Thad's opposite, soft around the edges, kind-hearted, gentle, with big, warm, dark brown eyes, and his smile was like a thousand suns. But I was 17 to Kyle’s 23, and Kyle was a wiser man than most guys his age.
source
Haas (hate), Liebe (love), and the paradox of friends who said mean things about each other behind their backs--all this was new to me, the farm girl who'd never fraternized with anyone but cats, cows, and books. I'd ask Kyle how he and Thad could be such good friends when Thad would say this, that, and the other about him. I never meant to start a flame war. I just didn't understand people and relationships.
The semester that began in heaven ended in hell,
with Thad not speaking to me anymore, and I was blinking in the dust of a meteor smashing my world to bits. "Devastation" barely touches upon my mental state as spring ended and summer found me back at home on the farm, a lonely misfit once again, even when I detasseled corn with a busload of college kids. I talked to them occasionally but fell back to being an introvert, walking the corn rows wet with dew in the morning and steaming all afternoon with pollen stuck to our skin. Physical labor wasn't punitive for me, nor boring. I just let my mind detach and wander into the fictional worlds that I’d been retreating to for as long as I could remember.
I wrote anguished, desperate letters
to Thad--this was long before the age of email or texting--but he marked them “Return to Sender” and they came back to me, apparently unopened.
Come fall, I dropped out of college and worked as an aide in an elementary school, but I took a night class, and it wasn’t the same, of course, one night a week on campus--not even close.
One evening, feeling bold, I dared to knock on Thad’s door. He cracked it open. I might have said hello. I don’t know. I only remember asking this:
“Why do you hate me?”
“I don’t hate you,” Thad said. “You flatter yourself, imagining that I hate you. That would imply I felt anything for you at all. I am merely indifferent to you.”
The door slammed shut in my face.
He never uttered another word to me again, though I saw him occasionally in passing, and I quit the teacher’s aide job to return to college full time in the the spring, imagining that I might recapture the camaraderie and lively days I’d known only one year before, at seventeen.
Never again was there a springtime like Spring of 1980. Never again was there another Thad. Tuesday night "Stammtisch" with the German majors at the pub on The Hill, a bar near campus, also came to an end when Thad and his peers graduated and moved on. That Mary Hopkins song, "Those Were the Days," captured so well what I had lost.
I spent the remaining years of college in the student union, and people came to "my" table, but there was no comic duo like Thad and Kyle, no regulars with personalities like those who'd graduated and moved on after that hallowed Spring of 1980. Something set the people who graduated high school before 1975 apart from those who came after them, and I've never determined exactly what happened, but the Zeitgeist changed, and people of my sister Julie's era really were different from my own, a mere five years later. You can hear it in the music. By the Fall of 1980, the Reagan era and the Yuppies replaced the Woodstock generation. Good people and good things were never replaced, but something intangible and indelible faded into the past.
It took years for me to grasp how lucky I was to lose Thad. There but for the grace of God, as the saying goes, I might have married a controlling, petty, vengeful, mean person, as all three of my sisters did.
I married into Catholicism and really gave it my best shot, being open to belief, praying daily Rosaries, singing hymns whenever I was on my knees scrubbing floors-- “Speak, Lord, I love to hear your voice” -- but I was hard-wired for skepticism, not for belief.
5-Minute Freewrite timer went off a long time ago
And now I have to google the physical and psychological nature of hate.
Scientists prove it really is a thin line between love and hate
Some of the nervous circuits in the brain responsible for hate follow the same neuro-circuitry as the feeling of romantic love – although love and hate appear to be polar opposites.
A study shows that the "hate circuit" of our brains has something in common with the love circuit.
One major difference between love and hate appears to be in the fact that large parts of the cerebral cortex – associated with judgment and reasoning – become de-activated during love, whereas only a small area is deactivated in hate.
"This may seem surprising since hate can also be an all-consuming passion like love. But whereas in romantic love, the lover is often less critical and judgmental regarding the loved person, it is more likely that in the context of hate the hater may want to exercise judgment in calculating moves to harm, injure or otherwise exact revenge," said Professor Semir Zeki of University College London, who led the study published in the online journal PloS ONE.
Apathy
Was not part of the study.
Excuse me while I go google the brain circuitry for amoral and indifferent…
--Never mind that! I actually found photos of Thad and Kyle online--and I'm not going to [source] them for fear of giving away last names here.
They've aged well, no?
Kyle is still a great guy. He's a teacher. His students love him.
Thad is a professor, a PhD.
I don't hate Thad.
I want to say I am merely indifferent to him, but I have yet to achieve the detachment (apathy?) of the Buddhist.
Hatred
is not something I feel, not even for a murderer, not even for the drug-running criminals who stuffed my sister's naked, strangled corpse into a culvert under a dirt road.
Sadness, not hatred,
is what I feel: sorrow for the evil that some can deliberately choose to inflict on others.
Thad and I used to debate the concept of free will. He was a determinist. I could never choose to do what Thad did when he vandalized Andy Apple's car. Was it no choice of his to be an amoral bastard with charisma, charm, and wit?
I would never choose to harm another, but I couldn't reconcile the fact that I did in fact, hurt people inadvertently, and they didn't allow my ignorance as an excuse.
I forgive, habitually and to a fault, but it seems hardly anyone ever forgives my offenses.
This has been my mantra, my m.o., for life:
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
I have to forgive the slings and arrows others aim at me, whether deliberately or because they cannot help it, because I'm forever begging forgiveness of those I've offended inadvertently. If I withhold forgiveness, how can I ask anyone to forgive my own trespasses?
source
In recent years, books about narcissist explain guys like Thad, and again I thank God he slammed the door in my face, because I was foolish enough to have spent the rest of my life with him. All my sisters chose narcisissts as life partners.
If it was a choice. If "Free Will" is for real.
Sorrow.
My thoughts race through the old, well-worn pathways like one of those comets that can be seen every hundred years or so. At any moment the well-worn circuits of my brain will snap, and the comet will soar to uncharted galaxies, god or no God, because nothing is a state being I cannot contemplate, any more than I could fathom the apathy and indifference that Thad impaled me with.
I come, that my joy may be yours
is one of the Bible verses that stayed with me, while the hellfire and eternal damnation quotes were the first to go when I began freeing myself of the indoctrination of my childhood.
I married the right man
and we have three children and two grandchildren.
Thank God Thad threw me under the bus.
Life is good!
>Detasseling serves as a typical rite of passage in rural areas of the Corn Belt of the Midwestern United States.
For many teens in these areas it is their first job.
wikipedia
I appreciate that you share such a personal story with us. I think a lot of us have our own Thads. Somebody who we adored at certain period, who we lost and who made us realize how lucky we are that we lost them and that we live happy lives without them.
Sometimes is good to look back and appreciate what we have now. I'm happy for you that you realize that Thad had an important role in your life and that you didn't become like one of your poor sisters with their husbands.
Are you in touch with Kyle? Or is he also indifferent to you now? :)
Thank you for sharing! All the best to you and your family!
getting it!
Kyle has barely spoken to me since 1980, but I'd love to see him again sometime. Thad, no, I wouldn't subject myself to any of the censure I imaine he could convey without even a word...
I don't imagine Kyle would want to be reminded of that turbulent semester (I've been called a "whirling dervish" but not by Kyle). ;) --- it's never intentional nor am I ever aware of sowing discord or chaos!
Ah, my sisters. A sad subject.
You're right, most of us have had our own Thads. Maybe some of us are Thads! Do these people ever recognize themselves...?
I don't slam doors. I forgive to the point of being a floor mat. But my husband is coaching me on that ... just let some "friends" go and don't look back.
Thank you for reading and commenting, @delishtreats, and for * All best to you and yours, too, @delishtreats!
oh wow!!
What a story!!
I cannot imagine what it would have been like if you ended up with either since they were/are friends.
And what crawled up his backside.... like what was that whole thing about ?... so crazy...
Well, the next prompt may have a nicer character as your protagonist :)
https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-374-5-minute-freewrite-monday-prompt-sunflower-seeds
Hi carolkean,
Visit curiesteem.com or join the Curie Discord community to learn more.
Awww, THANK YOU!!!!!
What an asshole that Thad!
But he was a brilliant and witty asshole, that Tad! ;)
And I was stupid; I said and stupid things, because I was 17 and fresh off the farm, so what did I know? But he didn't cut me any slack. He just cut me out of his life, and I didn't blame him for that. Just - wow, the words he used. "Stick and stones" but words will never hurt me? That childhood truism is a total FALSE-ism. Beat me with a stick, and the pain wouldn't last nearly as long as those words did. Thanks for reading, @marie-jay, and for being right. Who needs people like Thad in their lives??
A very interesting love / hate story, approached from the everyday to the scientific. I am passionate about the subject of couple relationships, I know a little bit about the courtship dynamics, and I consider Thad to be a good seducer. If you notice, he praised you, to let you know that he looked at you in a different way than how he looked at others, but at the same time, he touched your fibers of hatred, and that is a technique used by men. With that they get positioned in the main thoughts of the woman that attracts them. More in his favor, he was out of the ordinary, he was an atheist with radical thoughts, and when someone is different from the rest, it's easier to look at him, right?
On the other hand, in psychology, that deactivation of reasoning when we are in love, is a kind of blindness that lasts about 3 months. As you say, we can not be critical. But 3 months later, when the intensity of falling in love decreases, it is when the reasoning part is activated again, and that is when we see everything we do not like about the person. Maybe that's why, when you came back and knocked on his door, you thought that Thad was no longer the same.
I connected a lot with your writing. I loved. I love this kind of anecdotes. Thanks for sharing. Greetings.
It was Kyle, the kind-hearted, that I first fell for. My relationship with Kyle remained platonic, as did my "friendship" with Thad. Kyle found a girlfriend the following fall and is married to her to this day. That left me imagining it was Thad I had loved all along. For years I kept looking for another Thad and nobody else filled those shoes until my vision was corrected to something closer to 20/20. My husband is more like Kyle, with humility and more intelligence than the erudite Thad ever acquired.
Three months--ha!! It was more like three times three years before I could see.
Thanks again ;)Thank you for reading and commenting, @pluridemensional!
A long time, but a valuable learning to be happy. Thanks for answering.
Just came across some drawings I made (freehand) during that awful summer of 1980, and of course the men resemble Thad and Kyle:
Those pictures are great! Dodged a bullet with that one did ya!! Glad to hear it. I miss you! I can see you've got your hands full with all this writing and researching!! Enjoyed the story - I used to be so infatuated with guys and I'd project so much onto them allowing them to define me with their acceptance or (mostly) rejection of me. And, oh, I was so very fragmented and split up inside by the time my hormones started flowing I was no special treat myself. It's taken a while but I've been learning to ground into and define myself rather than allow others to define me. I'm glad you married the best, most suited, kind and loving man for you!! Hope your novel is coming along. :)
Awww, thank you so much, and I hope you've read or can read about Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
by Clarissa Pinkola Estes Phd, and check her out on Facebook - she has memes like this:
I absolutely need to read that book! I'll put it in my Amazon cart to gift myself for the Holy Days. Thanks for the reminder!
I could imagine the people and the scenes while reading your story, and that only happens when I read something that I consider very good. It is seen that Thad was quite a seducer and somewhat popular in the university, maybe that's why you fixed your attention on him at the beginning. Kyle i like, the way you describe him is very nice, like a good man. Thank you for sharing your personal story and give scientific touches with the quotes you made from research articles
Awww, thank you for reading and commenting!
Thad and Kyle were a dynamic duo, and Thad had a following, of sorts, and lots of charisma, but if was a seducer, I was too ignorant to realize he was making any moves on me. No wonder he slammed the door in my face ! ;) Thanks so much for the kind words and for reading.
Wow what a brutal story. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for reading and commenting!