Interlude: Black
you have broken through my armor. and i don't have an answer, i love you all the same. i paint the things i want to see. but it don't come easy, i love you all the same. but you stole the sun from my heart. you stole the sun from my heart.
-you stole the sun from my heart
.
At times, it's depressing to think of the number of friends you have. Real, true friends. Not acquaintances. Not the people you go to have a drink with after a long day of work. Not the salesman at the Banana Republic who hit on you when you were spending a fortune in his store. No, I mean friends.
I can count mine on one hand. Less than that, really.
Please, don't mistake my saying that for something it isn't. I do not pity myself, nor do I feel as if I am the only one in this situation. On the contrary, I am thankful that I have the wit to notice and appreciate the people who truly matter, and separate them from those who would only let me down, in the end. But not everyone can be Kurt Wagner, trusted and loved by all who come into contact with him. Some of us do not have the temperament to deal with bullshit on a grand scale, and come out of it laughing. Certainly, we are lucky that some exist who do. Or the world would be a very dark place.
But there are so few of them, who can inspire that trust. Who are worth trusting. And that, at times, is what is depressing.
I'd like to think that I don't need anyone. But if that were true, I would never have spent those years in Alpha Flight, to be at Jeanne-Marie's side. I would never have forgiven her for distancing herself from me, genetically altering herself so that she was no longer my sister, the counterpart to myself and my powers. Certainly, I was the one who left the team, who put up a fight, who incited her anger with my foolish accusations. But she was the one who separated us, in a very real way. I would never have searched her out, kept her from murdering Wild Child. I would never have found her in that horrible school, that place where they tortured her through her childhood, and gotten her the help she needed.
Or tried to, at least.
And I never would have known what it was like, to have someone willing to give everything up for me. To have her expend the entirety of her powers, of her beautiful healing light, to restore my life, my abilities. I never would have known what it was to care for someone's life, for their well-being, more than my own, to do the same for her. I never would have met the people, the children, who have taught me so much.
I would be a very different man. Would I be as bitter? Perhaps. Would I be shallow? Absolutment. Would I be alone, as I am now?
Even more so.
But sometimes, alone is not so bad. Alone is better than with the wrong person. Having few friends, it's not so bad either. It's better than being alone in a sea of faces that were supposed to make the emptiness disappear, but fail miserably.
Our expectations are what kill our relationships. Not the failings of the people we enter into them with.
Sometimes, yes, it becomes more difficult. The days where I want nothing more than to allow someone in. It's never just someone, of course. It's always a particular person. Those who long for companionship without a face, just companionship, I will never understand.
Yet, I know I am a hypocrite when I say this. Because there is, in each of us, some kind of fundamental need to know that we are understood. I would not have written my book, if it weren't true of me. If I hadn't needed people to know.
But there comes a time when you can do nothing but sit back, look around, and accept what it is you have.
And that is when you grow up, and stop expecting a fairy tale to come true. And if it means you have to come to terms with the blackness inside of you, that's what you must do.
At least, that's what I get the feeling I'll have to do, when I finally grow up.