The Bliss of Night: A Collection of Short Stories and Poetry

Verbal Shrapnel

We were more than best friends, more than sisters. We were parabatai, bonded through trials and laughs. So when she used me against myself, I broke into a million tiny pieces. I couldn't, at the time, understand why she said the things she did. I have never been stabbed before, never even been stung by a bee, but in that moment, I felt like I had a thousand tiny daggers piercing my heart.

On that fateful October evening, we were on the phone. It was supposed to be a normal conversation like any other, the kind between two long-time friends. But it wasn't like that. Before I knew it, she was yelling at me, taking her anger over something I wasn't involved in out on me. I've always felt like two sides of the same coin: water and fire, calm and chaos. When she began to yell at me my instinct was to turn to that chaos and fire, but the more rational part of me overruled and tried to calm her, douse her in water and wrap her in calm.

"You were never strong," she said to me over the phone, voice laced with malice. Part of me knew she was trying to get a reaction out of me, hoping to hurt me in ways only she knew she could. "You never cared about me or any of your friends and everyone I've spoken to about you thinks the same thing."

That, of all the things she'd said so far that night, hurt the most.

The next thing I know, I'm sitting on top of my unmade bed, legs folded beneath me with tears running in wild lines down my face. My breaths turned shaky as she said, "You make everything about yourself."

She knew me better than most, knew how I couldn't handle being yelled at because it made me panicky and start to shut down. She knew that, yet she didn't care.

Finally, I'd had enough. I told her that I was going to hang up, that I didn't want to sit like a placating child while she berated me. The ceiling fan whirred steadily above me, the light casting a dull yellow glow in the room. I stared unseeingly at my unlit closet, waiting for only the span of a breath for her to reply. I shouldn't have waited.

"There you go, making it all about you again."

So I stayed on the line only for her to keep going, her words lashing me like a whip taken to skin.

When I thought that her telling me I was selfish and self-centered was the worst she could do to me, I was wrong. Because she did not go on with lies dripping from her tongue, she embedded poison in my veins and waited for it to sink into my heart. She used the things that kept me alive for so long that they became a part of me to tear me down.

"The only time you talk to me anymore is to ask me to read what you wrote," she said, venom in her tone. "You live in your fantasy world."

I shared my writing with her because I trusted her, I shared books that I loved with her because I loved her. After that, she was practically screaming at me. She kept going and going, using every piece of verbal shrapnel she could to dig into my skin.

My body shook with the force of my sobs, my vision blurry. She knew how much I loved reading and writing, the latter was and still is, the thing I'm most passionate about.

She had no right to use books and writing against me. I lent her my books when she wanted to read them, she fell in love with the characters and worlds the same way I did. I encouraged her to write the book she had abandoned time and again. We shared those things, we bonded over those things. But she tore it apart in front of me and doused them in kerosene and dropped a lit match into the pile, watching it burn with a distant gaze. She became a stranger so quick that it felt like getting whiplash.

For a while, after that conversation, I felt it hard to pick up a book or write a story without her words creeping back into my mind. Her words haunted me day and night, in wake and sleep. I loathe that I associate her hateful words with the things I most love to do.

If there was one thing I could change about that conversation it is this: I would have hung up when I had the chance to save us both the hurt in the end.