"You're so cynical you know. So... jaded. For a girl your age, you behave like your 30, like you've been through it all." He said to me, as if telling me would change anything. After all, if I've grown up, I can hardly recede back into the juvenile mindset he expected all girls my age to have.
"Then how should I be behaving?" I asked.
"Like the rest of us ! They date one another, or at least people their age, with our values, and they are enjoying it!"
I felt punched in the head. Did he think I was stupid? Or was he the one that didn't have any clue. That the other students dated one another didn't mean that they were less "jaded" then I was ; did he really think all of them believed they were going to get married to their current flavour of the year? There were people cheating on one another as it were already, and I wasn't the only one that was shagging around town anyway. And I wasn't the only one that was had varied sexual preferences.
"The frame of mine you are referring to, the "un-jaded" state of mind is stupid, useless and a liability. It gets you hurt when things don't work out, because you don't know that there will always be other people that are just as good who would want you just as much. It's like believing in The One, it makes no sense for your well-being. Emotional or otherwise." I told him as a matter of fact-ly.
"That's exactly what I mean! You're cynical!"
"I don't think so. But it's better to be cynical then naive." I said. "I'd rather expect disappointment and be pleasantly surprised, then expect good things and be knackered over by life. You're wrong, I am not jaded, and I have no reason to be. I don't believe in the things 18 year old girls that read Sweet Valley High on a regular basis believe in, but I have faith in the goodness of people. And you know what? I've never been disappointed. "Jaded people do not bother with the subject of their faithlessness. I'm still a romance junkie."
"Ah, everyone wants romance, but it isn't just like that. It's not so easy, and if you want it, why are you living the way you live your life. You're never going to find romance this way. And you're doing it all wrong."
"I live the way I live because I like it. And it does find me romance it would seem." And if not with people, at least with the act of romancing itself, but I didn't add that in, it would have hardly been possible to explain it to him.
"People like you, my dear best friend," I had wanted to say, "are the sort that never really live." I bet your girlfriend cheated on you before, but you just don't know it. Why should you be sad that I know better then the dim-wit still thinking a kiss to a perfect stranger should mean something? And why should I be frowned upon with pity when I kiss someone new I really like, even though I've already lost count of the people I've kissed?
I'm not able to feel less, I'm just incapable of feeling wrongly.
