“I can’t go through with it, Kate.”
I looked at my best friend Helena, not quite understanding her. There was no way that Helena was referring to not going through walking down the aisle in an hour, standing next to my brother, John, and pledging her devotion, fidelity, and love until death do they part.
“I just think this wedding is a mistake. It just doesn’t feel right.” Helena looked down waiting for the explosion that was sure to come. I stared at her–my closest friend and confidant for over 15 years, and finally saw the person I was always warned about.
“Kate, say something,” she pleaded, knowing that we were close to destroying a friendship that took most of our lives to build. Slowly I turned to face her, anger rising up inside me like fire, burning away all the love I felt for her.
“Helena, I know you aren’t pulling this shit again.” I said quietly, staring hard at her until she looked away and sighed. “And I know you aren’t doing this to my family...to John,” The crying came next, which I could have predicted for one of her great talents was producing tears in tough situations. It usually got her out of most things, but it wouldn’t this time, and most certainly, not with me. I knew her too well. She forgot that I knew her better than myself.
“You know that was a different situation with Stephen.” Helena spoke so quietly, I almost didn’t hear her. “I just realized that Stephen and I were better as just friends, I wasn’t in love with him, certainly not enough to marry him.”
“How is this different? You are most certainly doing the same thing!” My voice rose, to high pitch.
Two years before, Helena told me she was marrying Stephen Farris and with those words, a little part of my heart died. I had been secretly in love with Stephen for most of high school and my college years. To my dismay, his love for me was equivalent to that of a little sister. No one knew of my feelings except Helena.
To Helena’s credit, she asked my permission to date Stephen when they fell back in touch after a brief run in at friend’s wedding. I gave my blessing as I was rational enough to realize that he and I would never be. Their romance was passionate and intense, with daily phone calls from Helena filling me on every detail. The few who knew my true feelings towards Stephen were surprised that I could maintain any kind of relationship with either of them. Though difficult, I valued both friendships more that my infatuation with Stephen. The day of wedding, I knew I could finally move on and put the hope of any romance with Stephen behind me, wish them the best, and live my life. Getting ready for the ceremony, Helena turned to me with tears. “I can’t go through with it, Kate.”
The same words, the same reasons, callously uttered from her lips, destroying Stephen were now going to destroy my brother. I took her side then, this time, I would take my brother’s.
“Couldn’t you come up with a better excuse?” I asked, disgusted by my stupidity for falling under Helena’s spell for so many years. Now John would suffer for it.
“I am not trying to make an excuse. It’s just what I feel, Kate. I love you all too much to go through with it, because in the long run we’ll all be unhappy. Especially John. We’re better off as friends.” Helena came towards me, expecting me to embrace her as I always did when we fought. I turned away flabbergasted that she thought things would still be the same after this.
People were always amazed that we were friends. They warned me that after I got to know Helena, I would realize that she could be dangerous to my health, mostly, my mental health. I never realized that it would take as long as it did to learn that lesson. I met Helena when I was 13 as I sat in my backyard having only moved in a week before. Panic filled me as thoughts of being the new girl in school flooded my brain, when suddenly, an ethereal creature walked towards me across the uncut grass, her hands extended as she introduced herself, in her soft voice.
So profound was her beauty it evoked feelings of both jealousy that I would never look that way no matter how hard I tried and fascination at who this creature was standing before me. In two weeks, we were inseparable and I found the sister I had always longed for. She taught me to love life, be strong, and believe in myself. Those qualities didn’t come naturally for me as I struggled with insecurities; she gave me the balance I needed as Helena didn’t seem to have any. For her endless devotion to me, she was repaid with my unquestionable loyalty.
As much as people liked to judge me for being her friend, I found it amusing how their tunes changed when she turned her attention on them. Suddenly, their walls of dislike and distrust crumbled when she fastened her green eyes on them or flipped her platinum blond hair; engaging them in meaningful conversations and stroking their egos with affirmations that their words meant something to her.
They didn’t. They didn’t mean a damn thing to her. She may have been a lot things, but stupid was not one of them. She knew what they thought of her, what they felt about her, and how they loved to hate her. Helena brought that out in people she’d known all her life in our tiny Georgia town. She was too beautiful for some, not good enough for others; really you almost felt sorry for her for being damned on both ends.
Trying most of her life to be loved and failing took its cruel toll on her. The fates weren’t kind to her; she was doomed at birth, I secretly believed when she told me her story. Her father died when she was three and her mother resented being tied down to a child as she was a child herself. That left her grandparents, who did their duty to provide a home for her, if you could call it a “home” due to them unfairly and irrationally blaming her for their son’s untimely death.
People who have love don’t realize the damage it does to those you never had it. They are the ones who seek it desperately as if they need it to breathe. I swam in love, Helena was not so fortunate. Helena needed it to breathe and clung desperately to me and my family, and over the years she became apart of it. But because of that, I was blind to her dark side-- the need to control people, test them over and over, and manipulate them until their mental exhaustion was too much, pushing them to do the one thing she feared most: leave her. Her mother did it, her father too, everyone except me, she would say on days she felt sorry for herself, which were few.
In my eyes, Helena strove to be better than she really was, but unfortunately she was her own worst enemy. On some level I could excuse her behavior, believing that she had no guidance, no role model in those important, formative years to show her how to form and maintain healthy relationships, whether friend or lover. Helena’s extreme nature either led her to smother those who loved her to death with her neediness or push them away with her lack of empathy.
When she turned her attention to John, the part of me that knew her frailties wanted John to run and not look back. But the bigger part of me, the one that treasured Helena’s presence in our lives, embraced the union. It was a symbol that we would truly be a family.
“I know you’ll forgive me, Kate. You always do.” The desperation in her voice betrayed her overconfident exterior. Deep down Helena knew she wasn’t just walking out on John, but on all of us. The people she considered her family; the people who had loved her when others wouldn’t. Her destructive nature wouldn’t allow her to stop until there was nothing or no one left in her life.
“You’re wrong,” I said, and walked out first. I could hear her wails when the realization of what she’d done to us penetrated her selfish mind. She destroyed my brother. She destroyed our friendship. But really, she destroyed herself most of all. To me, that was the day I saw who she really was– that beautiful mask ripped off to reveal her true ugliness.
Distance and time are wonderful cures. I am happy now...so is John.
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