AMEINIAS

A Tale of Two Friends

I'm evil, I'm full of it, a monster of your creation. We have argued for many years, Narcissus. I gave you a throne and knelt at your feet, but now I say enough is enough. Maybe I can't boot you off so easily but I can piss on your cushions and make you uncomfortable. You think you are Helios and our world revolves around you. You had my heart, abused it, yet you think you deserve to keep it. What you deserve is suffering. I hope you are hurt, for all that you have done to poor, sweet, innocent Echo and I. I hope you rot in the pits of Tartarus when you die.

When the world was bright and new and my heart was full of light and hope, upon me happened the most interesting stranger. What frightens me now the most was that he had been unassuming when we had met; he could have been anyone. We were only little, around twelve years old and it was before we thought that anyone was capable of malice. That was the stuff you heard about in stories but none of it was actually true, right?

We were each other's only friends and we were content like that, more or less. He would tell me of his parents, of how cruel they both could be, when we were sixteen and still learning what the real world was like, when we thought we knew everything about it, ourselves and one another. Truly, we knew nothing at sixteen. I remember that year well; the first time he took my heart in his hands and let it slip carelessly to the ground. He didn't hate me yet to throw it but neither did he love me enough to protect it.

He was a hunter and I had no idea that I was his prey, thinking that he would protect me from people that ended up being just like him. I never liked hunting, per se, but hitting wooden targets instead, embedding my arrows in circles carved into trees. I never understood the glee that the downfall of others brought him, so I passed it off for the idea that it was the glory of putting food on the table that he enjoyed. It gave him an elevated sense of self-importance. To him, these animals were only good and useful when they were dead.

Narcissus wasn't completely heartless or else he wouldn't be a narcissist. He could not lure in his victims and keep them if he had never once been kind. There were times I talked often about which trees I found the most fascinating or the bugs I had discovered and these things bored him but he would listen. Albeit he would not listen with much enthusiasm but neither did I when I had no interest in the birds that he spoke of, the eagles and the doves. There were times we shared interests, like in collecting frogs from their hiding places and he would go to find them, even when I had moved on.

He was always more so stuck in the past than I had been. He spoke of how he missed our golden era, where we shared all of the same interests and hobbies and were inseparable. He did not like that I had steadily grown away from him, that I had my own life to live outside of him. At seventeen, he was no longer my only close friend and thus no longer my only source of solace and I was still his. All of his other relationships had been only twice as turbulent as ours and I had never stopped and wondered why he was the only victim every time and it had happened so many times.

"I am too kind," he told me, "for though she suffers and pushes me away, I will not let her be alone." Like a fool, I agreed. He was my best friend, my safe house, my hero. I would have died from loneliness without him but that was then and this is now. I no longer owed him a debt when he soured like an old grape.

One day, we were eighteen and I introduced him to my fast friend, Echo, who always mirrored my enthusiasm and brought light with her wherever she went. I had never known how she had suffered. I watched their friendship blossom with an interest in gossip that I did not share with them. I was content enough with other friends to not feel left out and actually enjoyed not having to carry the burden of conversation (I did enjoy speaking but it was exhausting). Echo did it all when I could not.

The thing that poisoned my heart was not the love he had for her but rather the love that he did not have for her. He treated her like a passing amusement. Narcissus couldn't even afford to do this, what with how many people he was losing all at once. I had been one of them, now only an observer from afar. Their conversations became less; not rare but on the verge of it. Echo never started any, not even non-verbally because by now, Narcissus' mask had fallen. I had left because he did not care when I spoke, unless it had anything to do with his desires. She did not speak until spoken to for the same reason. Even then, conversations were short-lived. He would simply leave once he got bored of her.

I'm not sure why she stayed. She didn't have as much history to keep her by his side as he and I and even that had not been enough to string us together. She had enough sense to leave other shitty men, so why not him? Well, she and I had an unspoken tension that broke me even more than losing him. He had convinced her that I didn't care about her, what with all the new friends I had made. She spoke to me even less than to him. If not for the rare conversation, I'd think she'd hated me enough to avoid me like Apollo's plagues.

Narcissus had begun his work on Echo, tearing her friendships apart where he was able so that she would become more reliant on him. The worst part is that I'm not sure he even realised he was doing it, but his intentions were always the same with his victims. I recognised these patterns. I survived them.

I wish I could have helped Echo disentangle herself from his web, beautifully woven from lies, as though he were Arachne, but he fed on her until her soul bled out of her and there was nothing I could do. After all the damage he had done behind my back, she would never accept my help. She would always side with him. He did not even revel in the damage because it did not matter, in his eyes. She did not matter. I did not matter.

I was not lonely without him as he was without me. I treated others as they treated me, so as soon as I ignored his rants about his life and his interests as he had done to me, of course he threw a temper tantrum. Everything was always my fault, in his eyes. He would admit wrong and feign change in himself like a spark that just won't light, until he told me everything. He felt no guilt. He never cared for what was going on in my life or for what I had ever enjoyed. He admitted to all except for his jealousy. He said he had not adjusted well to our new distance and needed time to accept it but years had passed and he did not.

Well, it's not my fault I have friends and he doesn't. That's not my burden to bear. It never should have been. He'd always hated anyone I grew close to, telling me that they'd only end up hurting me and encouraging me to leave them as soon as they did, yet not to grow and change with them, to be better because of them. He wanted me to be his and his alone. Seriously, this bitch was obsessed with me! He'd even talk nonsense to Echo about me – some passive aggressive comment – whenever he knew I was within earshot.

She would give me a sympathetic look and then little else.

He said he deserved better than this, but then he said, "How do people expect me to act right when they can't even muster up the common fucking decency to do it themselves?" I am a mirror to his inward appearance and that is what scares him the most. I frighten him, enough to make him defensive, and I can't explain how much glee that brings me. What a pathetic little man.

Any and all love for him he sapped from my heart himself in his desperate attempt to fasten the flow. If you do, you run out quicker and require another source of water sooner and this stupid, selfish man was dying of thirst. By this time, I was already dead and with my last breath, I would give him what he wanted: a water source. In my name, my beloved patron, Nemesis, cursed Narcissus to stare at his own reflection in the lake.

I hope he was disgusted with what he saw. I hope he screamed and sobbed and it tore him up inside and he could not look away. Even his tears, others would think were beautiful, for some odd reason, perhaps because he was kind to those who did not get close to him. I envied them in their ignorance and wanted to scream that they would not make of him a martyr. Those who heard of his story and of mine and Echo's but never met Narcissus were more level-headed, their brains not filled with fog. They saw him for all that he was and even so brilliantly named the misunderstood and hated personality disorder that he had presented after him.

He was, above all, nothing but a no good narcissist.