(this piece was originally posted on my essay site on Aug. 3, 2012 -- I'll be moving several other related essays from that page to this page shortly -- just to keep everything together in one place)
You can’t force someone to be your friend.
The more you try, the more they hate you, especially when they dislike you to start with.
In all this, there was never any middle ground, always all or nothing, and I wanted to stand some place in this that wasn’t so deep that I always felt like I was over my head, drowning all the time.
In the end, as the poem goes, I was swimming in quicksand, where there is never any middle ground, just oblivious.
I don’t even know why all this bothers me so much, why I need or desire someone else’s good opinion and friendship that I would risk my life to retain it, clinging to sheds of hope that it might be possible long after it clearly wasn’t.
People like me never get the message until someone puts a gun to my head and says: “Get it now?”
A friend asked how I feel now that I have capitulated. I said, like a wind up alarm clock that had been over wound for so long I’m not unsprung.
The inevitable, of course, is the long humbled walk away, back bend, utterly defeated, knowing that I will always have this gun to my head, always give in to whatever demand is made, losing dignity as well as the illusion of friendship.
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