For one thing, what kind of successor to the greatest genius the world has ever seen spends nearly four hours of every single fucking day solving the same god damn puzzle? Unless Roger manages to make puzzles with different shaped pieces in the exact same likeness on a daily basis, which I doubt he would do even for everybody's beloved little prodigy, the kid is actually a dumb ass. By creative and social standards at least.
But what can I say? I hate him without doubt, and for the longest time I thought that even if we weren't in our respective positions my hatred of him would be the same. As time went on, I realized that if the world really was a different place we would probably be friends. But things being as they were, I made it my life's goal to torture him, to make him feel all the tearing emotions of inadequacy that I felt. I wanted to watch him fall to what I had handled for so many years.
For a long time I thought he won, just as he had always done before. The more time I spent trying to make him miserable, the more I found myself wanting to protect him from the pain that I was so obsessively trying to inflict. In a nutshell, I started hating him less, liking him more. Here's the reason why I thought he would be the one to win this unspoken battle, he remained as indifferent as always. Even when I pushed him to his knees, when I did things that I swore I'd never speak of again, he remained collected and cold as ever.
I clearly remember thinking to myself late at night as my roommate snored beside me, 'If this is just some sort of sick act, he deserves an Oscar.'
But the truth is, the perfection that had come to madden me into passions that I am still figuring out even today began to shatter. Finally I managed to mess with his head. He grew angry. He opened up. As a matter of fact, the boy that everyone thought was so innocent and frail went into wild fits of emotion that even I had to shake my head at. A part of me loved watching him lose his cool over the feelings he had for me, whatever they were, but then there was another part of me deep inside that broke just as much as he did.
I watched his hot, passionate, angry tears fall on my floor many, many times. Some of it was truly from what I did to him. Most of it, as he told me in those long afternoons when neither of us really felt like filling our respective roles anymore, was from the pressure of being on the top and only being able to look down into the darkness below.
I look again at the teachers who mutter amongst themselves with distain as they speak of two people who nobody will ever know by true name. These words I am writing are my tears of guilt and shame over hurting the only person who has been my source of motivation and joy. My only equal, my opposite in every way.
