MINI ME.

28/04/2017

"Uhm Elise! I can't see the honey! Neither can I see the Mozarella cheese in any of these bags!"

I rolled my eyes at my reflection in the mirror as I did my eyeliner but I was also not in the idea of explaining to my mother that I couldn't get the rest of the groceries because of a boy. She wouldn't take me serious even if I did so the best thing to do was to twist the story a little. It's not lying neither is it telling the whole truth but the latter is preferable in this case, right?

"I couldn't find any of them," I called back to her from my room. Lying sometimes is not a bad thing especially when the truth will make you look and feel stupid but I'm not encouraging it. In fact I would rather you tell me the truth no matter how bitter it sounds because pain is a part of life and all we need to do is know how to handle it.

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I walked past mom the next day as she put on her jewelry whilst waiting for aunt Marie to pick her up for work. Aunt Marie was her college best friend and luck got hold of them when they met again at the same workplace after college. They literally did everything together, went shopping when they got paid, had a girl's day out twice every month and would facetime each other everyday after work to gossip about their boss or a workmate they both didn't like. I really envied their friendship if you ask me and mom would always tell me to find a friend that I blended with so well. Well the opposite was the case for me when it came to girl best-friendships. I would say I was on the wrong side of the world or luck just did not seem to come my way. I renounced every female relationship when I turned 13 after my ex childhood best friend told me she did not want to hang around me anymore because she thought I was not cool enough for her.

Her name was Michaela and we were five when we met after her family had just shifted into the neighborhood. It appeared she was the only girl my age at that time and that made it so easy for us to get to know each other well. The hood was a ghetto kind of place and both our parents were not rich at that time but we did not know that then, our naivety justified our innocence. We thought it was all gold and silver, waking up early enough to go run around the fields, preparing food made out of mud, making dolls out of clay and starting unnecessary fights with the older kids and returning home with dusty and ripped clothes. Those were the best days of our life that we could not phantom would end one day. We grew up together all the way through elementary school.

Honk! Honk!

"Oh that must be Marie," mom said as she got her bag and gave the mirror one last look before heading out excitedly. "Take care baby!"

She called out before I heard the car drive out. I nodded smugly at no one in particular at how she always amused me.

Back to the old story. Everything was going so well between Mike (as I sometimes called her) and I until the day her dad got contracted with a good paying job. We could see the change in class in the family as time went by. Sometimes they would invite us to expensive dinners that my mother could not stand being alongside a bunch of influential people. Michaela's mom rarely visited us as she would always do back in the days and even though I was young, I was old enough to notice the change in attitude when she was around us.

Michaela changed schools in sixth grade. We cried together when she told me about it because we knew that what we shared when were little would never be the same again and it wasn't long before our moments together began shrinking little by little, slowly but surely. I never really understood what was going on, everything was just moving too quickly for an 11 year old. I remember being always sad when she couldn't come see me after school sometimes. I was so used to being around her and it hurt when there was no one I could talk to. especially when my mother was trying to clean her own messes.

A few months later, Michaela's family moved out of their house, of course it was expected of them to but the best part was that their new place was still closer to the hood. Michaela had always told me that her father was building their future house so I always knew that one day she would leave me. I just never knew it would be soon.

The number of times she invited me over was uncountable and when she did, she would always laugh at the way I gawked at their surroundings. I felt obligated to study their house while I could and it was always refreshing to tell my mother all about it when I got back home. I made sure I memorized every part, every corner, every edge. Their house was one of those kinds that you only heard of but never really saw, except on TV of course. It was made of pan brick and glass. The walls were high, the ceilings were unreachable and the insides were painted creamy blue which made it feel even more welcoming. The backyard had a garden of flowers and herbs and a garden table with morsel embroidered chairs that Mike informed me was for outdoor dinners and tea breaks. It was quite a fancy life my dear friend was lavishing. She on the other hand was becoming a princess she had always dreamed of becoming, luckily everything was unfolding exactly how she wanted it to be. Claiming anything she pointed at, owning anything she wished for and having everything at her disposal. It was a dream come true, a dream too good to be true but a dream that was real.

"Would you love some chocolate dipped cookies, Elise?" Mrs. Lunders would ask me whenever I went visiting.

"They are lovely," Mike would assure me as she led us to the kitchen where a large bowl of cookies was seated on the central part of the island.

My jaw dropped as I walked into the kitchen which was two times bigger than our living room back at home. Its cardboards were properly set in what was called a kitchen unit. Everything looked so expensive, the plates, utensils. Everything was perfectly placed.

"Get a sourcer from there," she pointed to a chest of mini drawers while I stared back at her aghastly.

I was not ready to touch anything around here in any event that I accidentally broke anything my mother 's salary could not afford to pay.

So I said, "What is a sourcer?"

She almost burst out laughing but then remembered something and thought against it. "It's.." she said, walking to the place she had pointed to earlier. "... it's this Elise." She pulled out a small flat plate made of glass and placed it in my hand.

"Oh," I blushed while I did what I know best, study the perfectly carved plate. I could see my hand right through it and that was what really amused me the most, that a plate could be made that way.

Michaela chanted on emotionlessly about some cute guy that liked her but was not willing to reciprocate the feeling.

I asked her why.

She said, "Almost all the girls in my class like him and I don't want to fall in love with a commoner."

"A commoner?" We both giggled.

"Yes," she giggled lightly as she brushed her hands through her long silky hair, "I don't want to worry about other girls gawking over him while I'm not around."

She said the last bit quietly but I was too preoccupied with the cookies on my plate to follow along with her story. My mind had something about 'how the cookies we bought in the ghetto were nothing compared to this' going. Ours were always hard and a few days old you could feel them losing their flavour.

I watched Mike inattentively as I continued devouring and savoring every taste I could harbor from the cookies. I paid particular attention to how the chocolate coolly melted on my tongue and how every soft crunch reminded me how much I needed to have these more often.

"... so I always ignore him when he sneers at me in the hallway," I heard her say. "Can you believe he even tries to pass me notes in class?" she said wide eyed, as if she couldn't believe it even herself.

"For real?" I asked, uninterestedly, finishing my last dip and rising up to clean my plate and my host's. The place was eerily quiet except for the water running and Michaela's chatter. Aside from that, everything was a peaceful quiet for me and that was alright.

She went on.

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I mimicked to myself as I remembered how Mike would twitch her mouth in an 'o' shape as she spoke, it was more justified when she was spoke in an excited even tone. She had plump lips that made her look more like her mother than she did her father.

When we were thirteen in junior high school, just two teenagers high on emotions and embracing the new changes in feminine characteristics, my dearest friend had lost her calm personality. Her hormones were flying everywhere, left, right, sideways and center and she couldn't control them. We would be okay for a short while and then after that she would be mad at me for a silly reason. One time she told me to leave their house because she had enough of me for that day. Another time she was mad at me because the boy she always complained about in elementary school did not like her anymore.

I was like, "Dude, I thought that's what you always wanted."

I never understood her anymore. She was slowly becoming a different person with a whole new vibe, talk about more negative energy than positive and as time passed she was becoming a stranger, a type of child that a mother could not even control. My mother would always say it was just a phase that would soon go with time. But time was moving she was not.

The last I heard from her was when she told me she did not want to see me anywhere near her compound. I could not tell if she was having one of her mood swings then but that day I decided I had enough. I swore I was not going to be her punching bag when something went wrong with her boyfriends or rivals at school anymore. If she was human enough she would care that I also had feelings that I feared having being hurt by a delusional teenager that could not control her emotions around others.

Yes, I had come to accept that I would never reach her level of affluence. Not just yet at least. I only owned what my mother could afford, ate what she could manage to put on the table and went to a school she struggled to pay for but that did not give Michaela the right to make me feel like I really deserved that kind of a life. It was no point being around someone that made you feel less of a person, made you question your life choices or made you feel sad about the life you were born into, right? It was just a matter of time before things got right for everyone and my mother had me understand that my time was not yet here.

So I left.

My mother never questioned why I never visited Michaela anymore, I guess she saw it coming and which particularly had her at ease with me not being around Mike anymore. Mike never bothered to call or check up on me after that. I guess she was glad that I was finally off her hook. The irritating ghetto girl was finally off her hook.

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Well lords, ladies and gentlemen as Sir Robert Thier would put it, that was the end of my one and only acute female relationship. Luckily I lived long enough to never trust any female friendships and I survived without them.