It may or may not be time for another inevitable story that I really don’t want to tell but is necessary to have in this journal.

Um, so, please recall back to the whole horse thing and how Chris was/is being insane about that whole matter. He asked me not to mention it to Aaron until he had a chance to speak to me properly about it (because apparently whenever he brought it up, he was on his phone and I was besting him with my typing and that was unfair to him; oh, well). Yeah, but the whole horse thing was driving me insane, so I did tell Aaron about it.

Aaron tried to be open-minded about it and tried to hear Chris out (even though he wasn’t there) but after much deliberation, the verdict matched mine and generally sounded like: “What the fuck is this child thinking?”

We both calmed down a bit, after about four hours of saying “what the fuck is he thinking” to each other in the car on the way to Commerce. It just doesn’t make sense to either one of us to be trying to buy a horse when you still need to finish up school. The plan makes sense in Crazy Chris Land, but unfortunately, the world doesn’t have the same rules as that wacky place.

Aaron and I got to talking about what made us different than Chris, what made our choices rational and reasonable and what was making Chris’ choices insane and unbearable. We kind of figured that maybe Chris was making insane choices because he hadn’t been through some of the things that Aaron and I had gone through (ie molestation, parents trying to kill themselves, a bipolar grandmother, an emotionless family, irrational parents; family problems and a grandmother that killed herself, respectively). In other words, maybe Chris was making choices because he really didn’t have the skills necessary to make choices that made sense, that mattered, that would help him, that weren’t completely ludicrous.

It seems that maybe people who have gone through things that rock them off their intended course of immaturity and obliviousness tend to make more reliable, smart choices about the things that they invest themselves into. Aaron and I both want to go to school, are going to school and know that it’s the best choice for us. We’ve picked majors and with little deviation, we’ve stuck to them. Chris, on the other hand, has been about as stable as, well, (to go with the whole horse theme) a stable during a tornado. It lands somewhere for a while and then moves for no real reason at all, then again, again, again. It makes no sense, it’s random and Aaron and I are thumping our heads on walls trying to understand this.

We figured that yeah, Chris had a grandma that died a few years (of natural causes) and that’s about as intense as it gets for him. He didn’t have to deal with any kind of a mess in regards to that—well, besides the normal “grandma dying” sort of ordeal. To put it the way that Aaron did:

    Grandmas are here for two things: to make you cookies and then to die on you.

And, well, I haven’t personally had a grandma (that I knew anyway) die on me, but I imagine that it’s a lot less severe than having a mother who constantly tries to kill herself and then being blamed for it. It just seems more sensible to assume that my situation would fuck me up more and therefore, because it’s pushed me further off a path of normalcy, I’ve had to work harder to get back on it.

I’m not sure if that makes any sense, but it just came to me: maybe it’s like that, a path. We try to strive to be normal, to have as little issues as possible, but each time something huge happens, we get knocked off that path and have to strive extra hard to get back on it. That’s why people that go through such intense shit are stronger people, can cope better and don’t make dumb-ass choices.

A day after Aaron and I talked through this, Chris came over to try to explain his side. It just turned into him being passive aggressive and him not understanding anything that I was saying.

A day after that, things were still awkward with Chris and I, but he came over to help me with my 365. He got a call from his mother and she told him the news: his grandfather had killed himself that morning.

And the rest is history. Aaron and I promptly shut up and got off our high horses (mostly) about the whole thing. I feel so insanely bad for even saying anything like that and now, I feel even WORSE.

I went to the funeral and put up with awkward family relations because I felt so bad for saying what I did. If there’s a god of “I’ll show you what’s what” out there, I really hate him right now because this was not funny.

Maybe this whole horse thing was a lesson for me to learn, not Chris: maybe I need to learn when to shut up.