Words for My Enjoyment

Words For Your Enjoyment: Revenge

July 8th, 2005

Friday arrives again with the sun in the sky, a literal cacophony of visual stimuli for the eyes. But more important than the expensive S.A.T. prep-classes that provided me with the talents to ramble off complicated sounding words, the likes of which I have no concept of their meanings…is a moot point when matched up, next to today’s “Words For Your Enjoyment.”

The submissions were numerous and the digital greeting cards were appreciated, but in the end WFYE chalks up another successful idea to WFME regular Chris, who says:

“Revenge: Have you done it? What have you done and why? I mean everyone gets irked at some point and wants to get revenge.”

Aaah, sweet revenge.

Revenge seems to come in my forms and flavors, for many reasons and with many motivations. Some people enact revenge when they’ve been wronged (or when someone close to them has been). Some people get violent, get crazy, and get just plain lunaticical (S.A.T. word, people). This is not one of those violent, crazy or lunaticical stories.

Well, it’s just sort of stupid.

I was young. Not that I’m not young now. But I was younger back then. I was away in the Tahoe area at a summer camp for a 12 day session. Over those 12 days I had fallen for a girl who was the perfect everything. Perfect hair, perfect eyes, perfect body, perfect voice, perfect ears, perfect nose, perfect feet, perfect fashion sense, perfect pony-tail doer-upper and perfectly angelic.

I sorta liked her.

I spent days and days (6, to be exact) slowly working my way into her heart. We spent time together. We talked into the wee hours of the early morning. We went on walks and hikes. I signed up for special camp classes and events that I knew she would be at. She knew my name, don’t get me wrong. This was no “admiration from afar” scenario where she didn’t know I existed. She did. The two of us got closer as those twelve days wore on, and on the last day of camp, before we were all about to go home… Before we were to return back to our origins…

My best friend asked her to “go”.

“Go steady.” “Go out.” “Become boyfriend and girlfriend.” Whatever the hell you wanna call it, this so-called friend snuck in right behind my back and asked her to become his whatever you wanna call it. After all the work and effort I had put forth into a blooming relationship, he had weaseled his way into my sunshiney world and took everything that meant anything to me.

She said yes.

The revenge meter was going to eleven at this point, and I recall feeling the anger boiling inside of me. Like Ceaser and Brutus, this was just as bad — stabbed in the back by a close ally while my back was turned… Like Helen of Troy and the battle over love — this paled in comparison. Like Some Kind of Wonderful — well, there had to be something in that movie that applied here too. I disregarded right from wrong. I didn’t put any thought into the fact that the revenge I was about to enact might be considered crazy. I just sucked it up, wiped my eyes, and hit him where it hurt.

I asked her best friend, who I really didn’t know, to “go”. And she said yes.

The sidekick. The “best-friend.” I had swept her off her feet in the minutes after the disaster. I had taken her out of singledom by asking her to be mine. Mind you, I really didn’t know her that well, but she was best friends with the girl who had just been swept off her feet by my nemesis. What better way to enact revenge than to ask her best-friend to “go”? What better way to cause my nemesis to think, “Oh wow, he’s really pissed at me.”

I had been wronged. And I struck back like a thousand soldiers with a thousand swords with a thousand reasons to kill those who stood in their way of “the ultimate prize.”

I was ten. What do you expect?

Posted under Revenge, WFYE. |