Epilogue -- Part Four -- Friendships And Handshakes

In the culture I came from, whenever you do things friends remember, you get a special hand shake or an eye roll. In most cases for me, it was always an eye roll. For my friend it was always "It's just him."

It was one of those things where you become known for one thing, and people aren't quite sure how to feel when you do something totally random and out of character. Unless of course that becomes your character, in which case never mind what I said before. I had my own particular kind of weirdness, though mostly expressed through manuscripts. For me because most of what I ever saw him write was mostly poetry to girlfriend he was breaking up with, he never really had an outlet for expressing his weirdness in a safe way. Thus our friendship was always something that made me on edge, and letting him find me girlfriends always made me uneasy.

I tend to write about girls going to the guillotine, getting their heads taken off. He would at times mock me about this, comment something crass about my sensuality, and then move on. But he liked the idea of making me uncomfortable with myself. So it was easy to just let him do the talking for the most part, and so the habit of mostly listening to others and taking notes was born. I never seemed to adjust to that habit when I was learning history. But keep in mind history only interests me when it's about some cute girl getting the chop on the block. Her little brown pigtails tumbling into a wicker basket and the crowd cheering.

The fact this was a practice mainly limited to noble between England and France until 1792 for France was something I hadn't thought about until recently. I was mostly enjoying the image of heads falling in baskets. I never expressed any of these images to my best friend at the time, mostly because as an INFJ it's difficult to communicate how you might get nervous or you wet yourself from the idea of being a victim in an execution, without necessarily actually wanting someone to die.

Such submissiveness was mainly limited to women in our culture. I am a woman of course, however it wasn't like Tennessee was going to acknowledge this fact. Ask any trans woman born here. Oh and there you can't even change your birth certificate. It's like France and Italy in that regard. But at times my friend would continue to tease about the fact I got a thing for the heads going thumping.

Well I'm sorry, that's so me.