“Geesh, Ro, not everyone is out to fuck with you. All I was suggesting was that maybe one of these shrinks can help you. That’s all. I wasn’t trying to sell you on their shit,” she huffed.
“Everyone’s out to fuck you, Sybil. You’re the fucking addict, who was disowned by her family . . . did you talk to anyone about that? I don’t need you worrying about my problems when you don’t even know how to deal with your own.”
Sybil let out a gasp before she wiggled back under her covers facing the wall, away from me.
Oh, man, I fucked up.
Why did I always do that? It made no difference who it was or what they would say, it didn’t matter; I always pushed the other way. If she hated shrinks, I’d find words to argue for them. I was always the devil’s advocate, even when I didn’t agree with the bastard. I guess it was just my nature to push people away. A nature that was built upon the disappointments that were cast on me from the first day I was born. A destiny that was seared into my DNA the moment my dickweed father shot his sperm into the snatch of my narcissistic mother. Munching through the barrier of her egg, this fuck’s sperm beat the odds and nine months later, voila, there I was breathing the stagnant air of a life born to a winning combination of alcoholic as well as abusive parents. It was nothing I could have changed and only something I had learned to embrace night after fucking night when I’d hear dishes smash against walls, voices spewing hate, skin being slapped, then eventually fists cracking bones.
I’ve twisted my emotions into a tight knot and dropped them into the belly of ‘who gives a shit’ my entire life. Eventually, the defense mechanism that saved my sanity as a little girl became the character flaw that kept me isolated as a woman. I knew I should have said sorry. I should have used the thoughtless word to pacify Sybil, but sorry came at a price I wasn’t willing to pay. I can’t apologize for the sins of others, no matter how much they try to convince me it was my fault. This time sorry clung to the back of my throat and clogged the ability to find a way to express my remorse.
“Goodnight,” I chimed before I strolled into the kitchenette that filled up less than a quarter of our five hundred square feet. With exaggerated effort I filled the teakettle with water and plopped it on the stove. When all else failed, tea seemed to help.
There wasn’t any reaction from Sybil. I’d pissed her off and I was going to live with the consequences of her silent treatment until tomorrow evening when she and I’d go hustle our pavement on Geary and Taylor together. The vicious circle reared its head in every relationship I had. I never kept lovers and I had always kept friends at an arm’s length away. Even though Sybil was one of my only friends, one of two people I considered anything close to family, I couldn’t apologize, it was something I just simply couldn’t do.
The water in my kettle had begun to boil; I pulled it off the heat, robbing its opportunity to announce that it was ready. Marked by the moment I dipped the Sleepy Time tea bag into the scorching hot water, I finally felt the click of my mental clock and the need to go to sleep begin to rule over my need to relive the memory of that day over and over again. My eyes became too heavy to keep open and my mind stopped its endless barrage of torturous bullshit. “I’m sorry, Sybil,” I whispered under my breath . . . Finally I was able to fall asleep, without taking a sip of my tea.
OKAY, SO I was wrong about Sybil forgiving me for being such a bitch to her. I should have known when she took over Bambi’s corner for the last couple of nights down on Jones and O’Farrell that she wasn’t as ready to forgive me as I initially thought. Damn, I didn’t want to have to work at this. I just wanted to be friends without all the bullshit drama of hurt feelings and guilt trips. I guess that was asking way too much.
When I met Sybil a couple years ago, she was twenty-one and just as brash and unemotional as I was. We accepted each other for all the fucked up scars we had. She might not have had the same unhealed wounds that kept oozing from her childhood on a daily basis, but she had had her fair share of demons she fought every day.
Sybil constantly battled the wicked grip of heroin, lured into its ecstasy over five years ago. Three hits later, she was a full-fledged addict. The claws of her sickness dug deep into her flesh, keeping her until she hit rock bottom and was found overdosing on the grimy floor of the AM/PM bathroom. Black tar heroin stripped her of everything until she was nothing more than a junkie frantically chasing the next hit to function in her daily life and avoid the sickness.