Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 122966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 615(@200wpm)___ 492(@250wpm)___ 410(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 615(@200wpm)___ 492(@250wpm)___ 410(@300wpm)
I merely smiled to myself and helped her reattach her water bottle. I could trust her to turn my life story into something she gave herself homework to figure out better.
“What were we talking about?” She frowned before she remembered. “Oh, right! You being a dick. Yeah, so it’s pretty self-explanatory if you think about it. First time since moving on from your childhood, you open up to your wife, and she betrays you.” She shook her head, sobering. “My methods would’ve been different, but I wouldn’t be able to forgive that sort of betrayal either. Well…” She squinted at nothing, officially thinking out loud. “That’s not true,” she backtracked. “I can forgive and forget fairly easily, but that person is out of my life for good. He or she becomes completely irrelevant. Like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I’d just stop talking to them. I wouldn’t acknowledge their existence.”
I knew that part about her. She had two lines drawn in the sand. If you crossed the first one, she’d hear you out and most likely offer a second chance. She was strangely forgiving. Until you crossed the second line. One strike and you were out. I’d witnessed her go through her reasoning a few times over the years, twice with former friends in school who had talked shit behind her back. Once with a distant cousin of theirs who had mocked Willow for being nonverbal.
I reckoned most of us had those two lines. There were always infractions we were able to forgive—and some we couldn’t. With Elise, those lines were just easier to see. She had an ability to shut down emotionally—as well as power up—that I hadn’t seen in neurotypical people.
“I guess you couldn’t get rid of that anger and hurt,” Elise said. “Hence your treatment of women—not to mention the projections. Obviously not healthy, but still understandable. We’re a very flawed species. And it’s funny, because flawed is our nature, and yet we get angry when we do flawed things.”
“How do you figure?” I asked curiously.
She sidestepped a rock that was in the middle of the path. “The way I see it, we can have order, or we can have freedom. We can’t have both. So, we’re constantly trying to balance the two—like, get as much of both as possible—and it makes it impossible to avoid clashes. Because with free will, you get a world full of voices, all of which come from different backgrounds with different histories shaping their opinions. And in that mess, we seek order to uphold a functioning society. But with everyone’s free will and freedom, chaos doesn’t erupt on a global scale. You get tiny mayhems instead.” She’d lost me. I quirked a brow, confused, and noticed she’d become a bit lost too. She scowled to herself and bit her lip. “Here’s what I mean. We see things from our own perspective, which is a flaw in an argument or any kind of meeting with another person, because no one else will ever automatically put your perspective first. And you told me that your ex-wife had once forgiven her dad for being a distant father.”
“Yes?”
Elise couldn’t possibly compare that to what my mother had done, could she?
“Right, so bad parents resulted in turmoil for your ex-wife,” she concluded. “That was her version of chaos—something she felt the need to fix. So, in an attempt to restore order—while stupidly projecting her own past on to you—she approached your mother. She disregarded your personal wishes and reached out to the one person whose actions you could never forgive. But instead of bringing back order, she brought you chaos. She obliterated your trust and tipped the scale to the point where it was no longer just one woman hurting you—it was two women. Then you had that sadistic aunt of yours, too? Make that three women. Three women. That’s a pattern. And don’t get me started on that, because in chaos, we get desperate for understanding, and patterns can seem solid and reliable.”
In other words, when my head was fucked with all the hurt, I’d spotted a pattern and decided it had to be true. All women were vile.
“I’m sorry if I’m not making sense,” she said. “But I keep seeing people as visceral blobs in my head. Willow summed it up great with some quote about us, the human race, making permanent decisions based on temporary feelings, and it’s exactly what we do. We react to things—which is normal—but we probably shouldn’t file that as evidence or assume everyone reacts the same. It’s stupid. It was stupid of your ex-wife to assume you’d find peace in forgiving your mother. It was stupid of you to project three women’s horrid behavior onto all women in the world. Darius was stupid every time his anger dictated his next move, which was always a new mission.” She huffed a labored breath. “We’re just stupid, Mister. Flawed and stupid.”