Two Sides
We were just school rivals. I sometimes wonder if we would have stayed just that, had things been different. Petty, malicious, sneering and tossing our heads the other way, each with our little following, our juvenile grudges. We were pushy, full of insecurities and naive simplicity, and thought we were bigger than the world. My jeans and hoodies, scraggly, ruffian look, quick temper and impulsive bravery. You, with your pristine pale features, aristocratic bearing, haughty lips and bloodline pride. Me - an orphan and castaway. You - a doted on only child. An outsider rebel and an insider to a dark society wrapped in secrecy. We both belonged above the crowd, projected the persona people wanted to see. Both forced to live with the molded weight of expectations…our destinies. Content with our paltry schoolboy feuding, we were nevertheless forced to unwanted extremes. Play areas became battlegrounds, lessons, sparring matches. Our words were weapons, but they weren't enough.
War was waged in the school corridors.
We wanted fist fights and mean-spirited practical jokes, cutting sarcastic banter and gloating upper-hands. The war gave us death, and torture, gave us heavy guilt and panicked split-second choices. The war gave us darkness and heaviness, scream-inducing nightmares and sobbing in abandoned bathroom corners. The war gave us terror and clawing for survival, choose-us-or-choose-them mentality, loved ones or strangers, pushed us to the brink of an uncrossable divide. The war forced us from school rivalry to arch enemies, and neither of us wanting the roles we played, and neither of us feeling we had much choice. Our destinies. You were marked for darkness. I, to fight against it. We channeled our burning frustration, our simmering anger, at our situation, at our authority figures, at people, at the war, and used each other as outlets for the violence we felt. Not even realizing how similar we were. I screamed into the sky, let loose through hurtling air. You let silent tears trail in a dusty room by an old wardrobe. Our hands shook holding our wands. We were left with the choice of murder or unthinkable consequences. We were the weapons of a new generation, puppets for a bitterness carried from another age. Defined by the choices our families made before us. We both knew what we had to stand for the moment we entered the Wizard world - figure heads leftover from a war that wasn't ours. I had to die for my cause. You had to kill for it. And we both felt the cold chill of the world. Somewhere along the line, we ceased to be school rivals. Suddenly, we were just pawns, and the game wasn't a game anymore.
You might have wanted to punch my face in, but you got to see me tortured and degraded, wanting death - but never begging for it. Never begging. I was relentless in my mockery of your position, but I was shocked when faced with you on a cold stone floor, bleeding out in a hundred different places, water and red pooled around your pale white, eyes torn with anguish.
We never wanted any of that.
The realness of it spoiled our shallow judgements, our superior contempt and easy ridicule, because how could we fight an enemy we sympathized with, or at the very least, had pity for?
We wrestled with being 17, with life and indecision, with love and honor and bravery and the meaning of these words we throw around, like family or right thing to do. We did what we needed to do to survive, and rationalized our decisions. I hid my numbness behind reckless emotion - you hid your emotion behind your facade. I despised a fame that put me places I didn't want to be; you coveted a fame that would take you where you wanted to be.
We were legacies. Falling apart in broom closets and bathroom stalls. Trapped in the legends of our names. We children. We were used. And not so innocent any more.
But I wonder, were we really opposites?
Or were we just two sides to the same coin?