CRUSHED, I TURN TO YOU
May 7, 2002
They tell me that an average teenager goes through so much angst and pain over the most inane events. Over the course of my career as an observer and reporter, I learned to agree with the ironic fact that adults spout during therapy sessions and group meetings. I have had the immense pleasure of writing about the psychotic cheerleaders believing that the world would end just because their jock boyfriends fell on top of another cheerleader from the visiting team. (Notice the 'Drive Me Crazy'ness of it all.) While the blonde heads cry over the injustice of being known as the dumpee, the world spins around and children die of hunger on the other side of the globe. So much for Adlai Stevenson's shrunken globe and men no longer able to live as strangers.
I am a cynic. At least when it comes to teenage drama, I am not very forgiving. I am fifteen years old and I hate being fifteen. If I were twenty, maybe they would entertain me at the UN Peacekeeping Volunteers stall at job fairs. If I were twenty, maybe I can leave the teenage crap behind and finally be free to lend assistance to people with real problems.
But I am fifteen and no matter how much I try to be free of all the angst, I am trapped in its soap operatic hell.
Maybe it's because I've not been blessed with Lana Lang's allure that although I would not admit it out loud, I am very insecure. Who can blame me? I exert so much effort to be the best person that I can be, and I get less attention than the girl who only has to turn her head and bat her long lashes. Either way, I am ashamed to say that I am starving for people to notice me.
As I see it, I am on the losing end of each one of my male relationships. My mom left my dad and me when I was five. While that circumstance alone should have pushed the two of us together, my dad threw himself into work. Sure, I don't doubt how much he cares about me. I saw it in his eyes when we were held hostage at the plant. But the rest of the time I feel largely ignored. My dad has his own demons to deal with. If working with animal shit wards away those demons (It should; it gets me running and I am not a running girl.) then I won't stop him.
Lex has more and less promised me that he would always be there for me. He loves me, sure. I'm in love with him too. And if you think those simple statements equal happy ever after then you should cough out fairy tales every minute. See, while I am trapped in this teenage hellhole, Lex can easily get out of this place and live the life he wants. Sometimes I think he's just as trapped as I am, and it's my fault. He can leave if he wants. It's not only his dad who has him locked down to Smallville. In those small fantasies I have that he has not disproved yet, he is staying imprisoned because of me. It's still the same though. I will always be left hanging because we can't stroll down the flowered streets of Smallville all in love. And Lex can always decide that he's tired of waiting. He can have any woman he wants-women who are not underage, and who has had all the baby fats that come with not reaching eighteen yet sucked out of their body. Victoria Hardwick proved that.
Pete and Clark, my two very best buddies since moving to Smallville, have repeatedly showed me how amazingly unimportant I am in the greater scheme of things. Pete has only so much he can offer, and he puts all his time and attention to girls with whom he can have a relationship. Sure, he more or less admitted a certain attraction to me once, when he was affected by the Nicodemus. At the same breath, he gave me the answer to why he doesn't pay as much attention to me. The fact that I crave attention from Clark crossed me off his list. Clark, I have liked since moving here. Clark is the one who at every turn slaps into my face that I am not as pretty, as interesting, as loveable as Lana Lang. And Clark has the temerity to get pissed when I find an available guy who actually seems to care about me.
May 7, 2002
Strength is not the ability to perform physical feats that require muscles and bones. If I believed that, I would not be who I am now.
I learned from my father the strength of will that gives you the determination to crush everyone who stands in your path to your rightful place on top of everyone else. It is his vision that propelled me to hone my mind, to achieve the honors I have received through college, the profit through my earliest business deals. The strength that he gave me is the strength that will allow me to exist as a name both admired and feared. I wonder if that strength will turn me into a man I would be proud to be.
From my mother, I learned the strength of a heart that survives even though your body is failing. It is the strength with which you love that will see you through the darkest hour. It is this strength that I carry with me through all the hours of every day, the strength that carries me forward although inside I bleed at all that fate throws at me. My mother's strength gave me a weakness too. Often I wish that she had given me a shield to protect the Achilles' heel that her strength came along with. While my heart is strong, I intensely need to be loved in return. It is so easy to bring me down after that. Does my father not use this weakness against me all the time? He senses my need, and like the Luthor that he is, he plays on it. Mother set up. It was Pamela who first showed my dad how debilitating it is for me to be betrayed.
Despite what happened with Pamela, what continuously happens with Dad, I cannot help but think that there is a flaw in the protective shield I have built around myself, because Chloe managed to worm her way into my heart so easily. I excuse myself and my sorry excuse for a brick wall by saying that Chloe Sullivan managed to come into my life before all that. She was the girl who was safely ensconced in my life way before the two women who professed to love me left me without a by-your-leave. Sometimes I think Chloe is a bane. She is the sole living testament to the fact that I cannot completely cut myself off from my heart.
Away from Chloe, I am safe from emotion and from pain. Only people, to whom you give power to, can hurt you. I gave it to my mother and she is dead, beyond any means to hurt me even if she, impossibly enough, would try. Pamela has long disappeared from my life. The hurt from her betrayal and abandonment would always remain, but at least she would never be able to add to it again. My father and Chloe are the only two remaining figures with the power. I like to believe that I have strengthened my strength against my dad.
What I did not count on, in this place where I am most vulnerable, before my mother's grave, was that I would see Pamela again.
Over the course of the day and the night following that, I had fought off the urge to pick up the phone and talk to Chloe. This was my demon to fight, and she did not need to feel the weight of my hatred rested on my shoulders. To learn from my father himself that the woman who took care of me as only a mother could was dying; To learn from Pamela that all that I blamed her for was in fact sins my father committed. I abhorred being Lex Luthor then. Who I am was decided by lies.
I want to return to Chloe unaffected by what I started learning just the day before. I wanted her to have the same regard of me as she had since she was five. But right at that moment I knew that would not happen. I would be an entirely different person because of this. I only wish that she would learn to accept who I will become.
May 8, 2002
The door swung open to reveal the tired, aging woman tucked into bed, hooked on machines that beeped into his brain memories of younger days. He had seen his mother in similar position many times before. It was the beginning of his resolution never to cry. After all, he had cried so much then and it changed nothing. His mother passed away, leaving him in the care of a woman who would eventually abandon him to his father.
It had not been his intention to come to her for himself. He had only wanted to see her again, to tell her that he understood now. But when she began talking, telling him so many things he had desperately wanted to hear, the purpose of his visit changed. It was one thing to have assurances from Chloe. She was his heart and it was not better or worse that Chloe believed him to be a great person. It was so very different to hear it from Pamela, the woman his mother chose to take care of raising him. It was as if Lex were hearing the words from his own mother.
"How much I wanted to help you grow up," she told him.
"I wish you had," Lex admitted breathily. "I might be a better man." Faintly he imagined how much Chloe would have sputtered a protest to his words.
"The fact that you're here speaks volumes about the man that you are. Your mother would be proud."
Lex closed his eyes and muttered a reply. From his pocket, he drew a small book. He had spoken to the doctor, learned of Pamela's real condition. She did not need to hear anymore of the writings of a man who believed himself to be the universe, a man who felt the cosmos in his very blood. Swallowing deeply, because of how close the verses that would follow meant to him in all the time he lived without his mother, Pamela, and Chloe, Lex began, "To die, - to sleep -- No more: and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, -'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished."
Pamela smiled sadly and closed her hand over Lex's, which rested on the white sheet. Lex turned his hand and intertwined his fingers around hers. "You're not scared of dying, are you, Alexander?"
When his mother died, he desperately wanted to himself. It was a feeling most children who lose a parent felt. Death was no longer scary if someone you loved waited for you on the other side. "I'm not scared," Lex informed Pamela. "But I have so many things left to do here. I won't leave yet." He thought of Chloe, who remained on this side, waiting until they were both able to fulfill a promise. To assure her, he continued, "To die, - to sleep,- To Sleep! Perchance to dream: -Ay, there's the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause: There the respect that makes calamity of so long life."
Lex felt her grip on his fingers slacken long before he finished the passage. Slowly, he closed the book and slipped it back into his pocket. He rested his head back on the chair and closed his eyes. And then, long moments later, he carefully extricated his hand, stood up and kissed Pamela's forehead.
He drove away, back to Smallville, and the rain started to fall. There were messages on his voice mail, and he listened with only half his attention until he heard her voice. Breathing deeply, he headed towards the one place he would have rather avoided. Lex stopped his car several yards away from the interment.
The rain fell heavily around him, and it was such a cold and dark day. Lex hoped that someone was holding an umbrella for Chloe. He watched the funeral from afar, and saw the people disperse, heading back to their cars, leaving the Fordmans at the site.
And then he saw her running away, sobbing evident from the tremor of her shoulders. Her black shoes violently thudded through the muddy soil. Whatever she had seen or experienced during those last few hours, Lex was certain that she needed him just as much as he needed her. He slammed out of his car, unheeding of the mud that started to coat his expensive leather shoes.
Lex called out to her, their distance from the rest of the attendees ensuring that no one would pay them any mine. She looked up and saw him standing under the rain, waiting for her on the other side. Chloe ran faster, her small beret slipping from her head, flecks of mud ruining her black dress. Lex met her halfway, and she threw her arms around him and cried into his shirt. The rain on their clothes made their steps heavier as they proceeded to his car.
He opened the door, but she balked at climbing in. She looked worriedly at the pristine seats and mat. Lex shook his head and helped her inside, then dumped her muddy feet in after her. He opened the backseat door and took two towels from a bag he had taken with him to Metropolis General. Lex went to Chloe's side door and helped her get her shoes off. He handed her one of the towels to dry off, and wiped off the mud on her legs with the other one.
The rain on his back provided a rhythm that he worked with. In his head, he was preparing the lines with which to tell her about his visit, about Pamela, about love and betrayal. Chloe gripped his wrists and forced him to look up. When he read the pleading in her eyes, he stood up and got into the driver's seat.
Chloe used the clean towel to wipe his face dry.
May 7, 2002
They tell me that an average teenager goes through so much angst and pain over the most inane events. Over the course of my career as an observer and reporter, I learned to agree with the ironic fact that adults spout during therapy sessions and group meetings. I have had the immense pleasure of writing about the psychotic cheerleaders believing that the world would end just because their jock boyfriends fell on top of another cheerleader from the visiting team. (Notice the 'Drive Me Crazy'ness of it all.) While the blonde heads cry over the injustice of being known as the dumpee, the world spins around and children die of hunger on the other side of the globe. So much for Adlai Stevenson's shrunken globe and men no longer able to live as strangers.
I am a cynic. At least when it comes to teenage drama, I am not very forgiving. I am fifteen years old and I hate being fifteen. If I were twenty, maybe they would entertain me at the UN Peacekeeping Volunteers stall at job fairs. If I were twenty, maybe I can leave the teenage crap behind and finally be free to lend assistance to people with real problems.
But I am fifteen and no matter how much I try to be free of all the angst, I am trapped in its soap operatic hell.
Maybe it's because I've not been blessed with Lana Lang's allure that although I would not admit it out loud, I am very insecure. Who can blame me? I exert so much effort to be the best person that I can be, and I get less attention than the girl who only has to turn her head and bat her long lashes. Either way, I am ashamed to say that I am starving for people to notice me.
As I see it, I am on the losing end of each one of my male relationships. My mom left my dad and me when I was five. While that circumstance alone should have pushed the two of us together, my dad threw himself into work. Sure, I don't doubt how much he cares about me. I saw it in his eyes when we were held hostage at the plant. But the rest of the time I feel largely ignored. My dad has his own demons to deal with. If working with animal shit wards away those demons (It should; it gets me running and I am not a running girl.) then I won't stop him.
Lex has more and less promised me that he would always be there for me. He loves me, sure. I'm in love with him too. And if you think those simple statements equal happy ever after then you should cough out fairy tales every minute. See, while I am trapped in this teenage hellhole, Lex can easily get out of this place and live the life he wants. Sometimes I think he's just as trapped as I am, and it's my fault. He can leave if he wants. It's not only his dad who has him locked down to Smallville. In those small fantasies I have that he has not disproved yet, he is staying imprisoned because of me. It's still the same though. I will always be left hanging because we can't stroll down the flowered streets of Smallville all in love. And Lex can always decide that he's tired of waiting. He can have any woman he wants-women who are not underage, and who has had all the baby fats that come with not reaching eighteen yet sucked out of their body. Victoria Hardwick proved that.
Pete and Clark, my two very best buddies since moving to Smallville, have repeatedly showed me how amazingly unimportant I am in the greater scheme of things. Pete has only so much he can offer, and he puts all his time and attention to girls with whom he can have a relationship. Sure, he more or less admitted a certain attraction to me once, when he was affected by the Nicodemus. At the same breath, he gave me the answer to why he doesn't pay as much attention to me. The fact that I crave attention from Clark crossed me off his list. Clark, I have liked since moving here. Clark is the one who at every turn slaps into my face that I am not as pretty, as interesting, as loveable as Lana Lang. And Clark has the temerity to get pissed when I find an available guy who actually seems to care about me.
May 7, 2002
Strength is not the ability to perform physical feats that require muscles and bones. If I believed that, I would not be who I am now.
I learned from my father the strength of will that gives you the determination to crush everyone who stands in your path to your rightful place on top of everyone else. It is his vision that propelled me to hone my mind, to achieve the honors I have received through college, the profit through my earliest business deals. The strength that he gave me is the strength that will allow me to exist as a name both admired and feared. I wonder if that strength will turn me into a man I would be proud to be.
From my mother, I learned the strength of a heart that survives even though your body is failing. It is the strength with which you love that will see you through the darkest hour. It is this strength that I carry with me through all the hours of every day, the strength that carries me forward although inside I bleed at all that fate throws at me. My mother's strength gave me a weakness too. Often I wish that she had given me a shield to protect the Achilles' heel that her strength came along with. While my heart is strong, I intensely need to be loved in return. It is so easy to bring me down after that. Does my father not use this weakness against me all the time? He senses my need, and like the Luthor that he is, he plays on it. Mother set up. It was Pamela who first showed my dad how debilitating it is for me to be betrayed.
Despite what happened with Pamela, what continuously happens with Dad, I cannot help but think that there is a flaw in the protective shield I have built around myself, because Chloe managed to worm her way into my heart so easily. I excuse myself and my sorry excuse for a brick wall by saying that Chloe Sullivan managed to come into my life before all that. She was the girl who was safely ensconced in my life way before the two women who professed to love me left me without a by-your-leave. Sometimes I think Chloe is a bane. She is the sole living testament to the fact that I cannot completely cut myself off from my heart.
Away from Chloe, I am safe from emotion and from pain. Only people, to whom you give power to, can hurt you. I gave it to my mother and she is dead, beyond any means to hurt me even if she, impossibly enough, would try. Pamela has long disappeared from my life. The hurt from her betrayal and abandonment would always remain, but at least she would never be able to add to it again. My father and Chloe are the only two remaining figures with the power. I like to believe that I have strengthened my strength against my dad.
What I did not count on, in this place where I am most vulnerable, before my mother's grave, was that I would see Pamela again.
Over the course of the day and the night following that, I had fought off the urge to pick up the phone and talk to Chloe. This was my demon to fight, and she did not need to feel the weight of my hatred rested on my shoulders. To learn from my father himself that the woman who took care of me as only a mother could was dying; To learn from Pamela that all that I blamed her for was in fact sins my father committed. I abhorred being Lex Luthor then. Who I am was decided by lies.
I want to return to Chloe unaffected by what I started learning just the day before. I wanted her to have the same regard of me as she had since she was five. But right at that moment I knew that would not happen. I would be an entirely different person because of this. I only wish that she would learn to accept who I will become.
May 8, 2002
The door swung open to reveal the tired, aging woman tucked into bed, hooked on machines that beeped into his brain memories of younger days. He had seen his mother in similar position many times before. It was the beginning of his resolution never to cry. After all, he had cried so much then and it changed nothing. His mother passed away, leaving him in the care of a woman who would eventually abandon him to his father.
It had not been his intention to come to her for himself. He had only wanted to see her again, to tell her that he understood now. But when she began talking, telling him so many things he had desperately wanted to hear, the purpose of his visit changed. It was one thing to have assurances from Chloe. She was his heart and it was not better or worse that Chloe believed him to be a great person. It was so very different to hear it from Pamela, the woman his mother chose to take care of raising him. It was as if Lex were hearing the words from his own mother.
"How much I wanted to help you grow up," she told him.
"I wish you had," Lex admitted breathily. "I might be a better man." Faintly he imagined how much Chloe would have sputtered a protest to his words.
"The fact that you're here speaks volumes about the man that you are. Your mother would be proud."
Lex closed his eyes and muttered a reply. From his pocket, he drew a small book. He had spoken to the doctor, learned of Pamela's real condition. She did not need to hear anymore of the writings of a man who believed himself to be the universe, a man who felt the cosmos in his very blood. Swallowing deeply, because of how close the verses that would follow meant to him in all the time he lived without his mother, Pamela, and Chloe, Lex began, "To die, - to sleep -- No more: and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, -'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished."
Pamela smiled sadly and closed her hand over Lex's, which rested on the white sheet. Lex turned his hand and intertwined his fingers around hers. "You're not scared of dying, are you, Alexander?"
When his mother died, he desperately wanted to himself. It was a feeling most children who lose a parent felt. Death was no longer scary if someone you loved waited for you on the other side. "I'm not scared," Lex informed Pamela. "But I have so many things left to do here. I won't leave yet." He thought of Chloe, who remained on this side, waiting until they were both able to fulfill a promise. To assure her, he continued, "To die, - to sleep,- To Sleep! Perchance to dream: -Ay, there's the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause: There the respect that makes calamity of so long life."
Lex felt her grip on his fingers slacken long before he finished the passage. Slowly, he closed the book and slipped it back into his pocket. He rested his head back on the chair and closed his eyes. And then, long moments later, he carefully extricated his hand, stood up and kissed Pamela's forehead.
He drove away, back to Smallville, and the rain started to fall. There were messages on his voice mail, and he listened with only half his attention until he heard her voice. Breathing deeply, he headed towards the one place he would have rather avoided. Lex stopped his car several yards away from the interment.
The rain fell heavily around him, and it was such a cold and dark day. Lex hoped that someone was holding an umbrella for Chloe. He watched the funeral from afar, and saw the people disperse, heading back to their cars, leaving the Fordmans at the site.
And then he saw her running away, sobbing evident from the tremor of her shoulders. Her black shoes violently thudded through the muddy soil. Whatever she had seen or experienced during those last few hours, Lex was certain that she needed him just as much as he needed her. He slammed out of his car, unheeding of the mud that started to coat his expensive leather shoes.
Lex called out to her, their distance from the rest of the attendees ensuring that no one would pay them any mine. She looked up and saw him standing under the rain, waiting for her on the other side. Chloe ran faster, her small beret slipping from her head, flecks of mud ruining her black dress. Lex met her halfway, and she threw her arms around him and cried into his shirt. The rain on their clothes made their steps heavier as they proceeded to his car.
He opened the door, but she balked at climbing in. She looked worriedly at the pristine seats and mat. Lex shook his head and helped her inside, then dumped her muddy feet in after her. He opened the backseat door and took two towels from a bag he had taken with him to Metropolis General. Lex went to Chloe's side door and helped her get her shoes off. He handed her one of the towels to dry off, and wiped off the mud on her legs with the other one.
The rain on his back provided a rhythm that he worked with. In his head, he was preparing the lines with which to tell her about his visit, about Pamela, about love and betrayal. Chloe gripped his wrists and forced him to look up. When he read the pleading in her eyes, he stood up and got into the driver's seat.
Chloe used the clean towel to wipe his face dry.