I feel oddly stumped by what I discover about this girl I knew in high school. I really knew her, in a way simultaneously more and less intense than intimately knowing someone. To make a long saga short I had a gigantic crush on her and rather than slink off when she rejected me I decided being her aim friend was worth my time and effort. We would talk for several hours almost every day about the most personal details of eachother’s li(v)es, but in class the next day it would be as if we’d never spoken, on both of our parts. I put in the weird parentheses just there because the vast majority of what I told her was total bullshit. I think I must have still been hoping she would find me interesting, which in my mind was the path towards falling madly in love with me. Once I started I just couldn’t stop, the lies kept building. If it wasn’t for my spectacularly bad social and critical thinking skills in real life I might still be staying up until 4 am chatting about things I know nothing about.

So we talked on aim all the time and eventually petered out that pseudo-friendship, and now we’re just facebook friends. And now I find that she’s taken every annoying aspect of our conversations and blown them up to the largest scale possible. Bragging, exaggerating, promoting useless pursuits as the essence of happiness, going on and on about how attractive people find her, hiding even the least embarrassing things in her life under a facade of angelina jolie’s type of self-righteousness. I used to hang on her every word, but now I just burst out laughing at her many status updates. Was she always this horrible in high school? Was that why my friend Kevin was so thoroughly unimpressed by her? I was always jealous of Kevin’s ability to analyze and make people think he’d switched off his humanity, but now I think he just had to maintain the simplest level of awareness to know how truly self-centered she is.

But her recently exposed idiocy is not exactly what’s stumping me. What I’m more surprised by is the implication of my most recent relationship. Ash is so similar to Sarah it’s almost creepy; their entire personality is nested in their image. They never let their guard down with people, because they don’t have a guard. Even their fears and secrets are somehow turned into ways of improving the level of jealousy and intimidation they instill in others. I don’t think it’s entirely conscious, and I’m not trying to make it sound so prejorative, but these are people who have no separation between who they want to be and who they are. They are utterly convinced in their own awesomeness, and confidence pays off. Instead of Sarah’s continual insistence that she can drink more and attract more men than any celebrity you admire, Ash feeds her image with grandiose ideas about radicalism and social justice and blah blah blah blah BLAH. It’s never, ever wise to date someone like this, there’s no room for anyone else. Ash told me from the beginning she makes a bad girlfriend, and like any other fool I thought I would inspire her to be different. Ash and Sarah aren’t my type to date, but I think I’ll always be drawn to people so opposite from myself. I joined both of their cults and with Ash I finally swallowed the kool aid just before she woke up to how useless I am to that image of hers. She’s going to get her heart broken by someone but it will be exactly what she needs. She’ll never learn her lesson; despite their obsession with their own image in the mirror, reflection is never going to be within Sarah or Ash’s superhuman abilities. I still find both of them among the most attractive things in my universe, but I view them as such things now. Like a piece of jewelry that you can see the bottom of because it turns out to be a fake, or a picture that you can only be enamored with for so long because it doesn’t hold anything to love. It took me a while to see it, but a thought that jumps into my head around them is ‘of course she does’. Of course Sarah can drink 50 shots in one day. Of course Ash will end up bagging that spoken word artist youth leader activist whatever-the-fuck who appears momentarily above her in status. Of course Sarah goes on 4 dates in one night only to talk shit about the weaklings who had to go to the hospital the day after drinking with her. Of course Ash told me I was harassing her for sending exactly one email and one text message.

I’m not trying to say that I’m completely over Ash (once an Ash or a Sarah trains her eyes on you it’s only a matter of time before bad poetry flows), but my still being attracted to her is such an…oddity.