Once Again

After I had voiced my thoughts to her, a moment passed where only the traffic outside my apartment was heard.

"I just can't understand you," she said abruptly with a quick shake of her head. If those words didn't cut deep enough, she continued the thought with a dismal look on her face. "You worry and dwell on things that don't even matter."

"I know," I found myself saying, and wanted to glare at myself for it. That wasn't how I really felt. I didn't invite her over just to act sheepish. "But-"

She shifted in the armchair across from me, tucking her legs under her and leaning against the armrest. She looked so laid-back for someone confronting their best friend about bad habits. Jenna interrupted me then, in a way where I knew I couldn't speak up until she finished. "Tay, you just have to let it go. You said it yourself, right? You could be thinking about much more important things right now! I know you could easily change the world, with the way you write. But discussing human tendencies or whatever isn't going to help anybody."

Leaning back in my chair, I felt as if I was starting to deteriorate inwards at each point she made.

"So you realized that humans are complicated--Sorry to break it to you, but that fact's been figured out and dissected to its every molecule long before you were born. What you talk about isn't anything new."

"I know," I said pathetically, my voice quiet, and my body wanting to curl up on itself and disintegrate into the chair's fabric. "...But it's all I know. I'm not smart, Jenna. I suck at math, and science annoys me too much to even try. All I have is my thoughts. This- this topic, what the human brain is and what humans...are, is all I can comprehend, and it's all I can relate to others. So yeah, I'm telling people things about them that they already know, and I hate that about me."

Pity was clear in her expression then, but I didn't find a trace of regret for what she had said before. "Maybe you should have gone to college after all..."

My gut twisted at that. "I hate you," I lied.

She snorted, knowing me too well, and merely laughed it off for a moment. "Why?" she then prompted.

I sat up straight and tried to regain some composure as I answered. "You're too much like me, only you're better, because you actually know how to dig yourself out of this hole... I know fully well that there's nothing new to learn about humans. I know that everything's already been written and discussed a million times over."

For a moment, she looked like she was going to interrupt, but I continued on. It was my turn. "Speaking about how we act, the way we do things, how we tend to react and feel towards everything, I know that it's all been expressed before. And that is the worst, because speaking about that is all I know, and it makes me feel like a fraud. It makes- English, and psychology, the things they teach in school when you read through literature and analyze the author's intent, it all repeats itself. The things I say have been said before and will be said again, and yet I as an individual can't deal with that, so I have to lie to myself and to others, and act as if these ideas are new."

 I paused, and let out a shaky breath. Jenna was looking concerned now, and it made me wonder how she had previously been viewing the problem, before this little speech. "I'm nothing original. If I had tried at math, I might have accomplished something no one else has, because math lets you do that. Math doesn't tie you down the way humanities does." I then gestured at myself. "But I didn't try, and now I'm echoing every other writer in existence."

...After a few hushed minutes of Jenna apologizing without actually saying sorry, awkwardness hanging heavy, she popped a movie in the dvd player and I allowed myself to be distracted once again. This was how it always went, except usually I was alone. I'd get overwhelmed with my thoughts about what I had been doing since elementary school, when they taught me to write stories and present myself as unique or all-knowing, and instead of a solution I'd distract myself with the very art mediums such as movies that I no longer believed in.