A Bridge Worth Burning

“Stop diagnosing yourself.”

With those three words hanging in the air, I came to a grim stillness. My heel stopped tapping its rhythm into the concrete, and my fingers stopped picking at the weathered edges of the deck chair onto which my anxiety had me glued. The air itself grew still, as if it felt the weight of the words and refused to carry them any further.

My eyes wandered from his fierce gaze as I sighed, pretending to assess our surroundings, but primarily taking a break from watching his jaw clench repeatedly.

I frowned at the jarring contrast of young laughter and playful splashes in the hotel pool three yards away. I knew I should’ve stayed upstairs and just gone to sleep. My misguided longing to be accepted had tricked me once again into thinking I could go with the flow. I came down here to get in the pool and have fun, not to sit in my dry bathing suit and take this verbal beating from someone who may not even remember it the next morning.

“See?” The sound of the beer can crinkling in his grasp pulled me back into his disapproving lecture. “You can’t even look me in the eye. You’re acting like a quitter, and that isn’t who you are.”

I glared into his left eye with a heat I’d reserved for those at the end of a bridge they’d provoked me to set ablaze.

I gathered my strength, my voice, and my self-respect as I stood from my seat, and said, “Who I am? How could you claim to know who I am when I’m still trying to figure that out?”

He held the bridge of his nose the way he always did when he’d run out of ammunition in the conversation; when it was time to pull the pin and throw the grenade.

“So, you’re finally going to stop blaming all your problems on your mom’s death and replace it with claiming to be autistic?”

All my words left my body, along with the air in my lungs. I could no longer see the shy boy I had befriended decades ago, when we were both so out of place that we had no one to talk to but each other. All the trauma, all the bullying, all the need for validation had suffocated the boy I once knew. Suddenly, I realized he’d been gone long before this. The drunken shell of a man seated before me had crushed the life out of him.

He shook his head as if for dramatic punctuation before saying, “I’m so confused.”

I turned and walked away, knocking over an abandoned drink without care. Over a swell of tears, and through gritted teeth, I said my last words to a former friend. Even though he was incapable of hearing them.

“So am I.”