Dual Duties ~~~

I'd never had a teenage rebellion. I'd never felt the need to. Sure, my parents were as strict as was expected of our kind of people, but their rules had hardly ever seemed like a restriction on my life. I'd never particularly wanted to break them.

I grew up with our kinds' set of values and customs, and while I didn't particularly dislike people who lived differently, I'd never understand them as well as I'd understand my own kind of people. It was an unspoken – though fundamental – rule that I wasn't allowed to associate closely with others not of my kind. I didn't see it as a big loss. I'd always be more comfortable and connect better with people of my own kind.

We travelled to France a lot during my school breaks, to flee from the dreary English weather. We had a family home there and we all spoke the language fluently. We spent a lot of time there and had French friends who too were of our kind. Even so, just because they were "our kind" didn't mean we connected as well with them as we did with English people of our kind. We shared a lot of customs and values with the French, but there were still cultural differences. Still, I liked them well enough, but I did understand English people of our kind better. So I always figured associating with English people not of our kind would be similar – we'd have the nationality and purely English norms in common, but views on family, justice and mercy, history, even human rights, would be different.

As I said, I'm sure they could be nice people too, but I cared more about staying on good terms with my family than associating with people who I was less likely to understand and care as much for as I did for my kind of people. So no teenage rebellion for me.

Then, when I'd just left home and was for the first time out of my parents' watchful surveillance, I met him.

My kind is very polished. Stylish. We speak well, always make an effort to look sleek and elegant, polite and reserved, subtle, perceptive and utterly sophisticated.

He was uncouth and brash, wore ripped trousers to make a statement, enjoyed drinking himself into a stupor for fun, jumped in the fountain in his clothes, ran and leapt and spun around in the middle of the street.

I found seeing someone enjoying being out of control was refreshing.

My kind values self-control above all else. He didn't care about self-control at all. Or he made it seem that way. He expressed feelings freely – even though I'm not sure if they always were sincere. There was always a measure of calculation to everything he said. I don't think a lot of his friends ever noticed, but people of my kind learn it from childhood and can recognize it from a mile away. It was a strange revelation, the fact that my kind was taught to hide our feelings behind indifference, while he hid his feelings behind false feelings. It was as if he portrayed an image of the person he was.

It made me wonder if all people of his sort had a false personality they put on. I'd always thought they wore their hearts on the sleeve. Perhaps it was a mixture.

It was a bit ironic then how their people accused my people of being lying and conniving when we only hid behind a blank slate while they seemed prone to projecting a false representation of who they were.

Or perhaps they didn't all project a false personality, but I couldn't for the life of me imagine that even they would want everyone to know exactly what they were feeling all the time. It was such a foreign, and frightening, concept for me.

I think I was drawn to him, just because of that. He laughed freely, he expressed affection, he showed passion. Before I realized the feelings weren't always genuine, I found it scary and mind-boggling, and when he offered me the opportunity to get to know him a bit better I couldn't pass up the chance to try to understand him.

It turned out he wasn't as transparent as I'd thought he was. I don't think he ever reflected on the fact that he hid a lot of himself from others. He wasn't taught to do it, like us. He did it instinctively.

He in turn seemed fascinated with my cool, aloof air. He didn't understand what I was afraid would happen if I let someone know what I really thought and felt.

He and I were strange together. He was a worker, very tangible, while I was a theorist, a lot more abstract. We both worked with problem-solving, though in very different ways. We weren't brought together by mutual ideals, as friendships and relationships usually happen, but rather by a fascination with the unfamiliar and a need to figure things out.

I don't think we did figure each other out, though. I never understood who he really was underneath that devil-may-care attitude. He never even understood that I had feelings underneath that mask. He said that he didn't care when people criticized him. Maybe he actually didn't, but I felt as if it had to be more complex than that. His devil-may-care image never struck me as a whole personality. There were parts missing. That's how I knew he hid things. When people who I'd never met before were rude to me I'd get a twinge of annoyance. He couldn't be that emotionless that he sat through an entire scolding feeling nothing, I knew that. And then he'd think I didn't care at all when I didn't respond to his affections in public, never considering that I didn't show feelings in public, ever.

We never made it past the initial fascination with each other. It wasn't burning bright, crash and burn. We never happened. Maybe it was for the best, or maybe we just didn't put enough effort into letting the other figure us out. We see each other sometimes, but I don't think he thinks I was ever interested, and I'm suspecting he didn't find what he wanted in me. But I can't know for sure. After all, we don't seem to understand each other very well.