Unknown to me, a darker path of a different kind had developed within me. After two years of bullying, insults and small outbursts in middle school, I entered high school. To my mild surprise, the bullies disappeared. I figured I had a bodyguard in my older brother, who was a Junior at the time, or else they were just bored. But the damage was done, and the seeds were sown.
As I walked into the high school on the first day of school, I constructed a mental fortress inside myself. I didn’t trust anyone I didn’t already know, and I didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t in my small circle of friends. I had the thought that my classmates hated me, thus they let me suffer mentally at the hands of bullies.
As a result, I quietly hated them as well.
I had a thirst for revenge. An eye for an eye was demanded from my point of view. I didn’t act on that thirst, for all I could do at the time was plan. I kept this dark side of me hidden as much as I could. I knew I would have to wait for the right time to strike if I was to strike.
The part that may seem scary, or should be scary, is that I didn’t want to get revenge by hurting them, I wanted them dead. My classmates left me to die, or hoped I would commit suicide so they wouldn’t have blood on their hands. This was just pure theory, mind you. I had no evidence, just a hunch. Thus I would take it a step further, do what they could not. These thoughts circled in my head, but I never acted on them. The whole time I was in high school, my acts of kindness to my classmates were nothing more than mass deception. When I would help my classmates with favors was just a way to get them to lower their guard. So when I would strike, they would be petrified and dumbfounded at the same time.
Whenever I did blade practice, a practice of swordsmanship, with a stick, some of them saw me practicing, they had no idea the imaginary foes I was cutting down was them. The practice was me getting the revenge I desired. The irony is that they sometimes cheered me on. If they knew the truth of who I was fighting in those practices, I’m certain they wouldn’t be cheering. They would be nervous or uneasy when I was around.