When I woke up the next morning, I relived the conversation I had had with Brandon yesterday about Carrie. Upon thinking calmly about the situation, I felt ashamed for being short and snapping at him, he had only been trying to help and I had let emotion get the better of me, causing me to act like an asshole. I knew Brandon had no class at the time when I had finished my breakfast, so I decided to call him.
"Hey," he answered his phone after a couple of rings. He sounded just as cheerful as I was accustomed to hearing.
"Hey," I said quietly, unable to say anymore for a couple of moments, still feeling very awkward and angry with myself for the way I had spoken last night.
"What's up?" he asked, sounding confused. "Is everything okay?"
"I wanted to apologize," I said, doing what I was now an expert at, and putting my emotions in check.
"Apologize?" he said in a tone of amazement. "What for?"
"Huh?" I said blankly. "For the way I spoke yesterday, in my car!"
"What are you talking about?" he said, now sounding positively bewildered, which was mirrored by me as I heard his confusion.
"Yesterday," I went on slowly, wondering whether I had gone mad in my sleep last night, "for the way I spoke to you. You were only trying to help me by asking that question about Carrie, and I... snapped. There's no excuse for the way I talked to you, and I'm sorry."
He laughed, while I simply held up the phone to my ear and listened in utter astonishment. Why on earth wasn't he angry or upset for the tone in which I had spoken to him?! "Take it easy, buddy," Brandon replied finally, still chuckling, "why on earth would I be mad about that?"
"Am I hearing right?" I said incredulously. "What I told you about Carrie was all true, but the way I said it was completely dickish!" He laughed again, even longer this time.
"You don't get it," he said, still chortling. "The way you told me all that stuff last night was the most important part of the entire conversation we had!"
"I... What...?" I said helplessly.
"I was listening to you last night more than you realize," he said. "Now listen. What you told me about her, that in itself was huge, and I realize how much effort it took for you to be able to say it."
"How did you realize that?"
"Because I haven't met a single person who's in our age bracket who's spoken about another person like that," he said seriously. I let out a small chuckle.
"Well, everything I said was true," I said. "I really do feel like that about her."
"I know that," he said, "and I had no trouble believing it because of the tone in your voice when you said it. It's not that you lost control or anything like that, it's that you were speaking purely from emotion."
"And that was a good thing?" I asked, starting to understand his train of thought.
"Of course it was!" he exclaimed. "Look man, I know you well enough and for long enough to have noticed that your mind is always ticking, you're always thinking ahead and you plan almost everything you're going to say very carefully and well in advance. It's brilliant, but the only bad thing about it is that if you're always planning ahead, then you've already subdued your emotions too much to ever let them out."
I was completely silent, but my heart was beating very fast and very hard. Brandon was right, I had been controlling my emotions for such a long time now that it was second nature, and it was true that I was constantly planning and thinking ahead for nearly every situation I ever faced. Nearly every situation. And Brandon had now seen the exception with his own eyes and heard it with his own ears.
