How Many Battles Must We Fight

How Many Battles Must We Fight to End the War?

That place is my haven. My home away from homes where my true family lies. It is my butter and my bread — the air that fills my lungs and allows me to breathe. All of the screaming children, the ratteling chains of the punching bags, the nervous laughter as someone flicks an ear, the footsteps on the wood made by little children playing tag durring classes, the brusles on the broom as it lifts the dirt and dust off of the mat, the sarcastic banter, the “Yes sir” and “No sir“‘s…. are all music to my ears. I step through the threshhold of that school, and I am home. I am surrounded by people whom I love and respect more than myself. Somehow the obnoxious kids and their even more obnoxious parents along with the annoyance of what seems to be the inability to exercize freedom of speech, constantly having to be on my toes, never knowing what mood the people who outrank you will be in, and the lack of off time does not phase my never ending caprice to be there. I am told who i may and may not befriend. I am unallowed to associate with the love of my life, who is also my instructor. I am usualy the object of some sort of argument or issue. I am egged on by a man whom I love and care for as a father, and it kills me that I can’t just grab him by the shoulders, shake him without rythm and beg him to stop! He claims to only be “messing with me”, but i take it as him attacking me. It used to be different. We were friends. He would talk to me as if i were important to him and i would go out of my way to prove my allegiance to not only him as my instructor, and my superior, but as a person and everything he stood for. We would talk, and be able to hold a conversation without tension or disputes. He would poke fun at me often, and i would be able to laugh right alongside him because i knew that he was only teasing me, and that his words were not stated maliciously, but playfully. I wish it were like that still. It seems like, now, we can’t even stand to be in the same room, breathing the same air. We exange akward glances and I receive weird looks out the corner of his eye. He is not nice to me, therefore i cannot take his “poking fun” at me lightly anymore. Friends poke fun — and we do not act as friends would anymore, but like two people who’s lives have both come to a point that happened to stop us in the same place knowing the same people. He makes fun of me, and has told me that his “goal” in life is to make me angry with him at least twice a day. I grudgingly admit as of right now that he usualy succeeds. He knows how to get under my skin and raise hell until i explode from the inside out. He knows exactly what to say… exactly what tone of voice to use in order to get a reaction out of me. I try to resist his constant efforts to break me, but I can only put on a playful smile for so long… fake euphoria is but pure melancholy in its upmost form. I know this man is not evil, and his intentions are not due spitefulness and haterid. He is a good, kindhearted man with a dark past. He faces unresolved internal battles, as well as undiscovered and — to him — nonexistant issues that he does not want to face or admit to. His childhood and adolesence is the conclusive factor in why he behaves the way he does and says the things that he does most of the time. I am sensetive to this because I feel his pain. i know what its like to not realize that the thing that you’re doing is socioty’s definition of unjust or ignoble because the only socioty you’ve ever known is but a dystopia. A child raised by a father who sees no value to women and sees his mother and sisters beaten reguraly has no other knowlage of a secondary choice of morals. In this lack of knowlage, this poor child knows nothing else, and therefore knows no better but to look down upon women, beating and raping them maliciously due to his unimaginably tragic childhood. And no countless years of theropy could ever change the way his mind was wired to work. Less extremly, this is how it is with us. He was raised a certain way by a woman who would be referred to as ”off” by most. Verbal abuse is a dominate factor in both of our childhood households. The only difference being that he is 37, married with two children, no longer dependant upon thoes people who molded that man who lives in my life today. While I am only 15. I am only a sophomore in High School. Unemployed and %100 dependant financialy upon my parents. The people who neglect me and fill my head with words like “worthless” and “stupid” and “dissapointment” and “failure” daily. I cannot escape this chapter in my life that he has already concluded. Not yet anyways. In him “messing with” me, I feel attacked. I feel as if he has taken the once untamperable relationship that we once had, and thrown it onto the concrete only to be stepped on and spat on until it is pulverized by the venum spewed through the words that we spit. The word “disrespect” makes me clench my jaw as my eyes narrow. That word was thrown arround so much at one point it became abliverated from my vocabulary. I hate using that word, and I hate hearing it used. We are so much alike in the fact that we both blow things and people off when we are angry, are feared and avoided by any and all surrounding us when our short fused tempers are tested and we get heated. Like myself he is stuborn, outspoken, close minded, immature at times, seemingly bi-polar, and extremely opionionated. The two things that set us apart from each other are very simple, yet complex and make our similarities fight against us instead of hold us together. One: He is 38 and going through what i think to be his “midlife crisis” while i have barely just turned 15, lost and horemonal durring the years in one’s life that are described by my oh so witty father as only one word : a “bitch”. I am stuborn and narrow minded because i am a teenager who unthinkingly tests my boundries while he just knows no other way to be. He doesn’t know how to put his guard down — his guard (lucky me) being verbal low-blows and snapping at people. Two: This is the simple factor that differentiates me from him — He has rank and senority as a third degree black belt and i don’t. It is in this reason that my resentment lies most sufficiant. I distinctly remember one thursday evening after testing. The door was locked, and all who remained were the two of us, his children, Connor, and Ellen. It was this night that Master Turner was too ill to run the show, so the responcability was left to lie in the hands of the second man on the totum pole. I had asked him a simple quesion regarding why he had pased a specific student, and i was dumbfounded as to why his reaction was as rasping as it was. He immediatly looked to defend himself in the only way he knows how… disregarding me as a human being with an opinion, and bringing me down emotionaly. I do not show weakness though. So I retaliated by the only way i know how… getting angry and deciding that i was right to voice my opinion, therefore he needed to listen to what i had to say. I was about to say things to him out of anger that would not be tolerated — him being my superrior and all — so i stated my famous final statement: “Whatever.” and stormed out the door. I was punished for illustrating disrespect to him by blowing him off. Ironicly however, the following day our battle had not ended. We found ourselves in yet another disagreement only this time i fought to bite my tounge while he said “whatever” and walked away from me. Being martial artists, he teaches respect being a two way street, and received when given. So why do you go agenst that moral? Don’t you practice what you preach? This incodent is but one minor example of the difficulties we share. Our metaphoricly father/daughter relationship ended after information that was given to him in confidance was revealed to others ending in my having to take a forced “break” to get “professional help” because I needed, according to them “more help than they could offer.” He betrayed my trust, stabbed me square in the back and laughed as i fell to the muddy ground. Even now my self inflicted burns and cuts hold perminant residance as scars, i feel as though nothing will ever be the same. Some trust is only posessed once, and as soon as it is broken then that’s it… never to be fixed or mended or even replaced. I dont beleive that 6 months ago, he would’ve gone out of his way to “mess with me” He should write a book on How To Ruin Someone’s Perfect Day. He is so amazingly good at it. He wouldn’t be trying as hard as he is to create conflict between me, Connor and Master Turner. He is narrating a story he knows nothing about. I dont understand why he must open up cans of worms that are rusty and welded shut for no apparent reason. I see no reasoning behind his malicious attempts to create tension and turmoil in the place i once called home with the people — including him — that i once called family. What is  the point of vollentarily playing the “Middle man”? Please help me to interprate this forign concept, Mr. Brayman! I want to make things tolerable with you in the least sense. I want to be able to call you my friend and be able to hold conversation with you like how it used to be. But i dont know how to make this seemingly impossable desire into reality. I can’t apologize, because what have i done? I can’t make you apologize, because there would be no sincerity in your words. Help me restore order again. Make TMAC my home again. Make me your daughter again. Make everything better. Please. I feel as if i am living in a glass box. I see, I hear, I know… but i have no power to change anything at all. Virtualy powerless in my own life.