Creation sinks Mountains bring Ages born through memory and lore

Once upon a time...

There was a girl who was cold and cruel.

No one was as smart as her. No one was as beautiful as her. Every day, she would sit at her mirror like a wicked queen and go on and on (and on) about how beautiful she was, and how hard it must be to be her sister and friend because no one was as beautiful, smart or as special as she.

And, because she said it so often, I believed her for many years.

I am not going to share pictures of her (magnanimously), but here are photos of me from the same era:

Not only was I very, very ill when these were taken, but the unwashed-with-sunken-eyes look was all the age of the era.

These were all circa 2010-2012.

 

This is me now at 37.

The wicked queen was also the epitome of the unwashed-yet-refined mid-aughts hipster era. (Yes, like all the unwashed hipsters, she moved to Portland.)

Just as I magnanimously won't share photos of her, I won't use her real name. For our purposes, let's call her Marion Hawthorne, like the evil girl from Harriet, The Spy. Beyond snobby (although snobby she certainly was), Marion, like Marion Hawthorne was cold and cruel.

She was never my friend; she was  a friend of a former friend, and a sister of one of my friends. She thought an awful lot of herself. My every interaction with her was nothing short of unpleasant.

Marion was so perfect, and she let us all know this, frequently.

It's interesting to me, how often people said she and I looked alike, and yet she always said she was the pretty one. 

"How hard it must be," she would muse aloud in front of her evil queen mirror, "to be my friend, when I am so beautiful...."

I know in the long-run, in the grand scheme of things, things like this don't really matter. Marion has her prefect life, married with children in her hipster bastion. Everything about her-- from her bland, beige, cheapo hipster wedding, to her smug  education was the measuring stick to which all of the rest of us were to be measured.

She was so much "smarter" and "better" than everyone else and then.....she did what most adults are "supposed to do." She was so much "better ," and then she just did.... what everyone else does.

Ultimately, she was not remarkable. She was just like everyone else. 

Behind her mean mean mean mean and deeply cruel roundel was a person who was average as best, unremarkable in most ways, except for her own self-importance and the depths of her cruelty.

I know this know.

But for a very long time, I  fully believed the things she said.

Just thinking about what a cruel person she is and how she always went on and on and on about how beautiful she was, and how we all wished we could be her because she was so beautiful and brilliant even now makes me bristle a bit.

Does she look back on these things she did and  cringe? Is she exactly the same? Does she know how her words effected people?

Do other people look back on and think about these things?

Or are there people who move through this world unaffected by the casually cruel?