Hate Looks a Lot Like You

Anouk Freudenberg

Hate has two hands and my name at the top of his wish list, but he’ll never admit that. Hate is 5-foot-ten, filled with lies and repression, his curls still wet from his morning shower as I pass him in the car on the way to school. Hate is pale and skinny. He only has one pair of shoes, beat up white Reeboks that don’t suit him. His voice is a deep murmur, soft and low and irritating. His eyes are the only honest part about him.

Every time I laugh, Hate asks me why, like laughing is something shameful and freakish and wrong. His friends only ever laugh when it’s at someone, especially me. Hate doesn’t listen when I talk about music, and he doesn’t look at me when he says that my favorite artist is boring, and her next album will be a pile of dogshit. He says it like it’s a joke so he’ll be off the hook. He doesn’t look at me when I go quiet, staring at my shoes, disappointment etched in every feature of my face. Hate yells at me when I call him, crying.

Hate thinks he’s a good guy because he says “I love you” sometimes, as if that means anything. As if I don’t notice that it’s only at home, only when we’re alone and he’s halfway asleep and silent. But then, that was a long time ago.

Hate is two syllables, 5 letters long. Hate is a name I’ll never speak out loud again, Hate looks a lot like you. He listens to r&b as he lays in his bed with the lights off. Hate needs to buy a lamp. He can’t shake off the lingering scent of my memory, can’t escape from the gnawing feeling inside him that looks a little too much like regret. Because hate misses me.

And that’s pathetic of him. Hate wasn’t supposed to care this much about me. Hate was supposed to move on like it was easy, but Hate’s no longer Hate now that I’m not his scapegoat. Hate is floundering, looking for a place to put his burning, for something to set on fire, for a pretty mouth to inhale his smoke. And I’m sad for him.

Because hate isn’t an absence of love. It’s taking love in your hands and dragging it out to the garden behind the back shed, shooting it 24 times in the head and leaving it there to rot, before realizing that love really served you better off alive.

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