I'm A Hateful Being

I hate introductions. Particularly when they're significant in length. A few pages, I can handle reading that. I'm sure it was riveting to the middle aged man who wrote it, but sometimes his opinion is just...entirely too boring, too conceited for me to deal with. I'd rather just read the rest of the book, please.

I hate tortellini. It doesn't matter what the filling is, what sauce you try to disguise it in. I hate it. The texture, the taste, the shape of it is entirely unpleasant because all I can think of is tasting it on the way back up, combined with cherry, anti-nausea medicine that I'd choked down only minutes prior.

I hate my stepfather. I hate the things he says. 

I hate when people smoke while they're walking. I hate smoking in general, but it's especially rude when you're walking in front of other people, not caring what toxins you're making them breathe in or if they have a severe reaction to accidentally breathing it in. I've had to duck off to the side and throw up because I wasn't expecting someone to be smoking on the pathway.

I hate em dashes. I'd prefer real punctuation. 

I hate acephobia. I hate it the most from the LGBTQA+ community, and I hate it the most when people don't realize that they're being horrible about it. I hate being told that I'll "find the right person" that I "must be boring" or that I "must have been sexually abused as a child". I hate it when people claim that acephobia doesn't exist while hating on asexual people.

I hate that so many people think that women's bodies are public forum. I hate that people assume the motives of women and girls because of how they dress or act. I hate that I am expected to take up less space or cower in a man's presence and I hate that I am supposed to smile because my anger, my hated, makes me ugly in their eyes. I hate that I can't go through my life without being subjected to the whims of men, but men can go through their lives without thinking about a woman's existence as a person.

I hate that I'm so hateful.

Gidget

When we first got my dog, my brother and I were terrified of her. There is no mistaking now that she is anything but vicious, her paws aching with arthritis and sores, and she spends most of her time lying in her dog bed and being picked on my the bigger, younger dogs of the house. She's just a small, plump, old pug, but when she was a puppy, she had boundless energy.

She would chase us up the stairs of the condo, leaping with her little legs over the gaps in the stairs. That was something else we were afraid of: those gaps. We thought we'd fall through and die, that Gidget would slip through and her teeny legs would snap in two. Because we were children, these were just the kinds of things that we spent our time worrying about. It wasn't as though we knew any better. We thought that was all there was to fear; nothing scarier than that played a role in our lives.

We feared puppy bites at our ankles instead of starving to death, something that our own relatives had dealt with. We feared unrealistic plunges into the basement, but we didn't think about being kidnapped, because we were optimistic and young.

Eventually, that real fear grew into a game of fear, a joke because how could we have been afraid of something so small and harmless? We started pretending to be afraid of her, but it wasn't real anymore. We would dangle our feet between the gaps in the stairs, pretending that it made us brave when we knew that it didn't. And my puppy grew older and fatter with time, two surgeries, and a broken leg. We looked back at her and thought of how silly we were to be worried about her jaws when there was so much more out there to be afraid of.