You were popular but you’d get in fights in the hallway. In school, you always had trouble compromising, paying attention, keeping friendships. For knowing you too well to let it slide, let you portray yourself as someone ignorant so you can fit in. Your closet is full of sparkly high heels, solo, without their mates who were left drunkenly on South Beach, wedged in the sand.Īnd sometimes you resent me for calling you out. You told me once that I’d be much happier if I stopped dating poor people. Your five-year plan involves marrying an NBA player. It’s chic to devalue yourself, to play Playboy-bunny-dumb and get bought diamonds, to be a Marilyn. We argue because when men treat you poorly because of how you look, you excuse their behavior with that’s “just how men are” and “They’re all gross.” You surround yourself with people who speak that way, think that way, act that way. To not need anyone else because the world is too large and too full of betrayal to ever be alone. I want to find someone who wants to hide away with me in a pillow fort, to drive to Montreal and skip work, to know immediately, ride or die, like Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette in True Romance. I throw myself in, diving head first into the shallow end. To get lost in each other and disappear from despair and desperation. With delusions of running away together and romance in “us against the world.” The expectation is to find someone who truly understands every crevice and tear and who is prepared to go Bonnie & Clyde. I approach romantic relationships that way too, with an undying immediacy. We are suspicious of love in other forms. We grew to fuse together, to only care for each other really, to question anyone who stepped up to us. Briefly, we turn on each other because we see mirror reflections and the shame of knowing too much. We are angry about how we are treated and we don’t know why. We are two young girls, noticing ourselves for the first time, not so far apart in age. That’s how we learn to love, by the absence of hate rather than by love’s proven existence. We’re two sides of the same coin, forged in the same hot oven, misshapen in our different ways. Neither of us have ever truly found someone who gets us. They bred us to need them, and instead, we needed each other. Our father, an alcoholic maintaining some of the necessary narcissism of his drinking days. Our mother humming through the house, anxious and cleanly. We were born together through Stockholm Syndrome. We are truly all the other one has and we act accordingly. Exasperated, flopping on our beds, groaning and hiding our faces in pillows and duvets. Instead of “I love you,” most times we say, “I hate everyone but you,” with affection.

I Hate Everyone But You by Gaby Dunn