Disclaimer: Smallville is not mine.
Pedestal - the base of a column or statue
If you have ever been in an art museum, then you know that statues come with rules. You have to maintain your distance. You can't touch. You most definitely do not get to climb up there and join them. You stay in one place, the statue stays in another, and there is no such thing as meeting in the middle. The rules are there for a reason; they protect the statue. It can't be tarnished or broken if nothing ever gets too close. It makes perfect sense if you are in an art museum. If you are dealing with real people instead of marble copies, then sense is not what I would call it.
I am not a pedestal girl. I get that. I don't even particularly want to be one. It isn't as if I am completely without experience in what the life of being a pedestal girl looks like. It seems a little bit lonely to me. That, however, is not the point. I am not the type that anybody puts up on a pedestal. I could make suppositions as to why - there isn't really any mystery to be found in the girl who has her thoughts splashed across the editorial page in black and white for everyone to see on a very regular basis. I am maybe a little too willing to share what I am thinking on a lot of little things, and it doesn't give anyone any space to pretend that I'm something that they have built up in their head that they hope for or wish for or want me to be. I get that. I do.
What I don't get is why certain people seem to be so very attached to holding on to something that isn't real. People don't belong on pedestals; they aren't statues. People are messy and flawed and have quirks that annoy even their best friends, but their best friends stick around any way because who that person really is is worth putting up with all of it. That's why they are best friends.
The point is that there is a huge, inescapable problem with putting people up on pedestals - they are eventually going to fall off of them. It can't be helped. Standing up there ever mindful of the edge of someone else's requirements is not a place that any of us are meant to be. We can't balance like that. We aren't supposed to balance like that. No one should expect us to try. It isn't fair to the person you are pedestal placing, and it isn't fair to yourself. You are either going to end up let down, stay standing so far off that you never know anything real about the person in question, or spend the rest of your life in denial pretending that reality doesn't actually exist. Who actually wants that?
I don't want to be the person up on the pedestal, but I can't deny that there is a part of me that still feels a pang every time I see the look on his face when he looks at his own particular pedestal girl. It opens the floodgates for all the thoughts and insecurities I try to pretend are not there about whether or not anyone will ever look at me with even half that much intensity.
It's ridiculous to let myself feel jealous of the result of a condition that I don't even want to have, but it happens all the same. I wonder if it's because it's him. I wonder if it would hurt less if I thought that he was seeing something real. I wonder a lot of things. Then, I remember that I'm not supposed to be wondering those things at all. I'm supposed to be over it. I'm supposed to be happily following along with the mutually agreed upon theory that we are only an us when it comes to being partners in investigating and the best of buddies.
I don't want to be a pedestal girl, but I am still a girl (and a teenage one at that). That means that I have my insecurities and my petty moments and my days that I want to scream out my frustration at the irrationalness of it all. (Believe me when I tell you that the irony of my urge to irrationally go off on a tirade about other people's lack of rationality is not lost on me.)
I've heard that it gets better. I've heard that adulthood brings a little more space from the pressures of the microcosm that is the high school habitat. My father reassures me that maturity in males includes a little more focus on reality and caring about who someone really is. I know that he means that. I'm not so sure that it is as universal of a phenomenon as he claims. I've encountered a lot of people (men and women both) who don't seem as if they've ever really left high school. The setting may have changed, but the patterns remain the same.
I don't want that to be me. I don't want to be standing to the side waiting for the pedestal to crumble so that I'm suddenly visible on the other side of the wreckage for the rest of my life. That sounds every bit as uncomfortable as being stuck up on it in the first place. It is every bit as uncomfortable as being stuck up on it in the first place.
I don't want to be a pedestal girl. I don't. I just wish the alternative wasn't being invisible.
Chloe's fingers hovered over the keys for a moment before her right hand moved up and to the right allowing her to hit a key at the upper right corner. She continued to hit it repeatedly as if the repetition of the motion would erase the words from somewhere deeper. It didn't. It only erased them from the screen.