How do you forgive someone that you never really knew?
Once I thought knew a boy, a demon really, who’s sport was to mess with people’s minds. Every time he lied, he smiled. And so that smile haunted me. It took years of friendship for me to realize he was the one poisoning me. Every smile was a facade, his endgame to make me into a zombie, forced to follow my only source of sustenance. It was impossible to breathe through the suffocation of his filter. I was trapped in the outlook of the world he gave me, helpless to find my own path, grasping firmly to the only person that truly knew me, who I thought that I knew.
So how? How do you forgive someone who abused the emotionally vulnerable? Who tricked me and countless others to fall into his web of lies?
After a while, I saw through the veil of his trickery. Every lie made my eyes roll so far into the back of my head they nearly fell out. What is it now? Cancer, chemo, seizures, broken leg, broken ankle. But what about my broken heart? I was always made to be the demon. The self-declared victim of the world, a sob story for the ages. The overdramatic brat who never listened.
How was I supposed to listen when everything he said was a lie?
I thought he was there for the best years of my life. But he was there to make them the worst. He was a parasite that fed off of the pain and suffering and misery of others. He was the self-imposed therapist that fixed everyone’s problems, the sunshine boy who could do no wrong.
But he helped you then, right? Of course. He helped me realize that I needed a professional instead of a teenager to fix my problems. But every memory that I will ever have of him will be tainted by one moment. When he finally exposed my worst fears to the world, I knew I had fallen into a trap. I tried desperately to fix it, trying to heal a deep wound with tape. But it was too late.
So he smiled. He smiled, and lied, and continued to run around making everyone fall in love with his appearance. The sunshine boy caused the problems of my darkest years to grow into a lifelong disease. All of my worst fears, everything I had ever confided, was exposed, and I was left hollow, aching for someone to help.
He was the drug that we were all hooked on. For the luckiest of us all, we were slowly weaned off, no longer needing him and instead able to other outlets to emote. But for the unlucky ones, they were cut off cold turkey. They still crave the attention, the support, the lies. They ruin themselves, hoping they can survive without the sweet nectar pulsing through their veins. But he made that impossible. The drug of his faked affection was too addictive to let go of.
So how do you grant mercy to the boy that ruined you?
You don’t.