Love+hate=Life

but hey, what are white girls gonna do except sneak out at night and through the woods to go have sex with their boyfriends?

what could go wrong??

and I do literally mean through the woods. our driveway is a quarter of a mile long through actual wooded area, and she wasn’t smart enough to grab a flashlight. but she could sort of see the headlights of her boyfriend’s car at the very end so it wasn’t so bad going down to be picked up

except when she got dropped off, she had to make the trip back up the driveway, through the dark scary woods, with no light whatsoever, at like 3 am or some other Gonna Get White Girl Murdered time

and she was high as fuuuuuuuuuuck

so she’s creeping her way back up the driveway, trying to move slow or else she’ll fall off the ground and get lost in the sky forever. really fucking high

then she steps on a frog

because we also have a 3 acre “pond” like our property isn’t fucking creepy enough already and my first-time-to-ever-be-high sister stepped on a FROG and apparently it both squished and belched, and keep in mind that with no light whatsoever she doesn’t know what the fuck just happened AT ALL

I wake up to a series of frantic text messages

hlp he lp HEL

dont’ tell momd and dad

i jsut murdered somtheing

also, just for context, this is also the sister that pierced her own ears and gave herself a stick’n’poke tattoo with a lighter and my mom’s sewing needle because she “got restless” and picked a fight with a girl two grades above, half a foot taller, and probably a hundred pounds heavier AND WON

(it doesn’t matter if you’re smol if you get ‘em on the ground and get on top)

anyway

so waking up to an “I just murdered something” text from her was … actually kind of inevitable. siblings are either ride or die or no officer I’ve never seen that person before, and that night, I decided I was ride or die

so then I take MY dumb white girl ass out into the woods in the middle of the night, but at least I’m smart enough to take a flashlight. sister had already texted me she was “onthe driveways” but again, that’s a quarter mile journey

finally I arrive at the scene of the crime

sister: sitting in the gravel, crying, makeup a Mess

frog: laying still beside her, looking like a slightly smaller Jabba the Hut

she points at the frog and sobs that it’s a heart. obviously a frog. a fucking BIG ASS frog, but still. I’m relieved, but also super pissed, because I drug myself out of bed, snuck out too, and dangled my sumptuous human body in front of all the Forest Monsters on my way down here and there isn’t even a fucking body

just a frog, which I pick up to show her is not a heart, and turns out to only be stunned! not dead! still very much alive and full of pee!!

so it pisses all over me and slimes out of my hand, escaping into the night

Also, when we move too much during an argument, or lean forward, it’s scary, and I never knew. I was even a little insulted at first, because surely she didn’t think I would hurt her. But see, that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t a sign that she mistrusted me specifically; it’s a conditioned response. (Although if you keep doing it once you realize it scares her, she SHOULDN’T trust you.)

Not every woman has been physically harmed by a man she trusted, but every woman KNOWS a woman who has.

I used to be horrible about this, because I didn’t realize how intimidating it was. I didn’t understand why the woman I was with clammed up or tried to tell me what she thought I wanted to hear, and I only got angrier, and acted even more like an asshole. It was wrong. It was abusive. It didn’t matter if I INTENDED it that way; it was still emotionally abusive. And it was inexcusable.

I get that when passions are high, and when you’re frustrated, it’s a natural tendency to let your voice get louder, to shout and gesture and lean forward. But you can train yourself to do better. You can train yourself to keep more of an even tone, to refrain from large and fast gestures, to not lean into her personal space. I did. I’m not perfect at it yet, but goddamn it, I WILL be.

Aerial warfare