Some might call me immature, holding onto adolescent betrayals and childhood heartbreak. Fueling Vendettas, if you will. Some might even combat me with an argument about how pointless the endeavor of grudges is, how forgiveness opens the doors to healing, or how energy is wasted on dwelling on the wrongdoings of the past. I don’t care. Literally, could not care less when it comes to some people. Cain is one of those people. In November, it will be five years since I’ve seen Cain. But if it’s been five years, why does the anger feel like boiling blood from a fresh cut rather than a wound healed 60 moons ago?
Why do we hold grudges if we know how immature and fruitless they are?
One of my longest-standing grudges is against an ex. Not exactly ex-boyfriend, ex-friend, ex-whatever you want to call it—just an ex. From when I was fourteen to eighteen, he was my whole world. I’m almost twenty-two, which means Cain turns twenty-four in December. I know this because much of our relationship functioned around the power dynamic that stems from a relationship between a fourteen and sixteen-year-old, fifteen and seventeen, sixteen and eighteen. I could go on. In our relationship, especially when tensions and dynamics reached their most toxic and most petulant, there were things “I could just never understand,” being “so much younger than him.” We were “in such different stages of life,” he’d try to explain to me. At the time, I took it. Maybe because he was so much older and wiser, he was right. He was going off to college on the other side of the Midwest, and I had to stay behind finishing high school. Maybe it was our age, with so much value placed on teenage caste systems and indicators of independence and superiority (i.e., driver's licenses, ACT scores, college acceptance, etc.).
The older I get, the more I realize my grudge stems from the grave condescensions he committed against me time and time again. Cain diminished my thoughts, my feelings, my opinions. My anger turned into pitiful petulance; my depression turned to stone. I wasn’t entitled to feel those emotions because, according to Cain, I didn’t understand. It simmered inside me like dying embers.
Last summer, in the smoldering heat of a midwestern summer, forcing many of us to find recluse in the everpresent air conditioning of our parents’ houses, I got drunk and followed Cain on Instagram. One might say the rest was history. Under the assumption that history repeats itself, then yeah, that person would be right. In the boiling five years since our breakup, he’d dated a friend of a friend: Sarah. The same age as me, going to school not much further away than I was, not any older or wiser than myself. It stung like a bullet and broke me like a glass. I played cardigan by Taylor Swift and stained my diaries with teardrops. I began writing poetry. I found a way out. I found writing as an outlet for my pain and confusion. Funny to think how your first heartbreak shapes you in ways you couldn’t quite comprehend, not until going back and forcing yourself to see so. He was all I could write about in those journals for what felt like an eternity. Cain was my tattered muse, a waving flag in shades of white, grey, and rose tint. We didn’t speak for four years. I never wrote about him again. Until now, of course.
Cain and Sarah broke up the year before, leaving him on the market for over a year. To a newly single Lauren, a Cain that “had changed,” as I heard relentlessly from my friends, sounded like the perfect miracle-move-on drug. Instagram stalemates, liking stories, liking old posts, adding on Snapchat, waiting in vain for him to text me first, as not to undo any power I might’ve gained in leaving him four years prior.
Some of me believed enough time had passed for me to hold a certain amount of power over the situation. Or at least, that’s my hypothesis. I went into our interactions motivated by ideals of revenge and painful inflictions. By that, I mean I craved to inflict pain on him. I wanted to break him. I wanted to see the look in his eyes when he realized who I’d become-- someone stronger than he could’ve ever guessed for me. That’s the poison of The Grudge, I suppose. We made plans to meet up, the illicit factor of it all too intoxicating, shooting myself up with a high I hadn’t felt in years. Cain was nicotine, novocaine, and heroin all in one go. He was a downer; he was addictive. He shouldn’t have been allowed to linger and saunter from town to town, ruining people as he went on. I’ve tried some drugs-- he’s the worst of them.
We never ended up seeing each other. I wasn’t strong, and Cain hadn’t changed. My visions of burning red revenge faded into embarrassment, making me smaller than I’d been since we last spoke. I wasn’t a mastermind, nor was I someone capable of enacting a grand scheme with the intent of “getting even.” And once again, we weren’t in the same stage of life, he told me last summer. He’d graduated college, moved back home, and took on a remote job working in politics for the state he’d just left. I still had another year left in undergrad. So, whatever we were, it was only casual. You understand that, right, Lauren? Or is it too much for you to wrap your head around? In his mind, I could never understand the pressure he was under. How could I? I’m just a naive little woman, right?
We’d stepped into a time machine I didn’t know how to escape. The shame of it made me feel sick. My grudge solidified further. What I wanted more than anything was to physically see him. Show him who I’d become. Show him I’m not the fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen-year-old girl he’d so easily condescended and manipulated. (But what if I still was?) I felt myself hardening each time I saw his name. For nine months of torture, he lingered in my DMs and social media notifications. Maybe he didn’t intend to provoke me (or perhaps he did), but I felt taunted, my anger building at each attempt to extend an olive branch.
I don’t know where I’m going with this anymore if I’m being honest (I suppose that’s the point of writing blogs? A space to explore ideas and air grievances?). I needed answers from Cain that he couldn't give me because he’d never be able to give them to me. He’ll never be able to apologize. I don’t think it’s in his nature. Maybethat’s what I needed to see-- that maybe nothing about him or the dynamic of our interpersonal relationship predicated by demand and withdrawal has, or will ever, change. I will never get an apology, and I think I’ve worn myself out. I’ve bled the ink onto the page-- I feel hollow, but not in the way it sounds. The hollow feeling could maybe be compared to draining a snake's venom. Now etched into words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages using some precious stone, the poison is freed from my veins. As I just learned, sometimes waving the white flag is a lot like stepping out of chains. Maybe grudges protect us from getting bit by the same snake that tragically tempted us. Maybe grudges keep us from learning lessons the hard way.
