Another girl series post!
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The girl stared at the computer screen in front of her. I can’t believe you do those things. What? Where was this coming from?
The girl sat in front of the screen, totally unable to respond. Were the things that she was doing not okay? But what was acceptable? What was normal?
If you really think about it, what’s the difference between normal and not normal? People say “normal is overrated” but what does that mean? What was normal? What most people do? But why do people even start to do it? When they started doing it, weren’t they “not” normal?
The girl sat in her chair and thought. Instead of responding, she ignored it. It was easy. Delete. However, the girl wasn’t as much bothered by the thoughts about normality and what it really was as much as the fact that the other person was so different from the person that she knew.
The other person was so nice in real life. The girl didn’t think the other person would ever say such things. They had buried their heads together, laughed, and giggled. How could that person ever say such things? Perhaps it was because it happened online, where appearances could be forgotten, where anything could be said, without a bad sense of impropriety afterwards.
Perhaps that was the problem with the girl. She was too trusting. She had believed for a while in the sandcastle fantasy that she shared with the boy. She had believed in this person, only to be slapped in the face with a rude statement.
Sometimes, people say that it takes effort to believe in the good of everyone. For the girl, she liked to believe everyone was good. It was her weakness and her strength. It took no effort. It was the way the girl was. A believer in the good. She liked everyone until they did something to her. It was bad because the girl was always left in the dust wondering.
It wasn’t that the girl wasn’t aware of the evils of the world. She knew. She saw evils with her own two eyes. She heard statistics about people dying, famines, natural disasters, wars… She saw the bad in people. She still wanted to believe.
It was a beautiful thing and a terribly sad thing to believe. The girl didn’t think that the world was just a world with sparkling shining things, with only happiness. She saw the world for what it was, a deeply flawed place with so many things wrong. The optimist in the girl refused to back down. She believed, got hurt, and still believed. The girl was either extremely stupid or extremely optimistic. Or both.
Maybe the girl was being deceived. The deception of life. The girl was capable of being cynical. It was this great duality that lived within her, the need to see life for what it is, flaws and all, and the other desire to believe in the world.
The cynicism. The optimism. The cynical side told the optimistic one to grow up and be mature. The optimistic side cowered. There was some truth to that. The girl would only be trampled on, beaten. The girl though, couldn’t give up the childish feeling of innocence and naiveté. The world was just a little more beautiful that way.
So, this great contrast remained for a little while longer…
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For an archive of the girl series post, you can go here. A new girl series installation is posted every Friday on this blog.
