Spawn, Sobriety, and the Fine Art of Misunderstanding

A conversation between chaos and patience.

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HIM:

You good, homie? 🤣 Sometimes rude, most of the time just mindlessly inconsiderate. I can only take it as a compliment, really — means you’re just you with me. But I gave up trying to tell you when you’re being inconsiderate. Because I don’t want an essay about how I’m wrong for feeling you’re being inconsiderate when you don’t even see it 😅

ME:

Fifteen years of friendship, and we still argue like teenagers trying to explain jazz to each other. I do not mean to sound like an essay; I just think in essays. It is a curse.

HIM:

That’s why I’ve been pissy lately. I’m rawdogging life — no substances, no filter — and my patience is gone.

ME:

Sobriety is a brutal mirror. Everything shows up at once. I try to remember that when he snaps. He is not angry at me — he is angry at everything he cannot numb anymore.

HIM:

It wasn’t about Pondus or Nemi. I mentioned Spawn and The Darkness. Those are sacred to me. You said, “If I had to read those, I’d never read comics.” That, dear Melinda, is rude.

ME:

For the record: I like Spawn and The Darkness. I said Pondus and Nemi were formulaic — because I am not Norwegian and they do not hit the same. Context. Always the missing ingredient.

HIM:

Then you just go about your day, unaware that you’ve pissed me off to the point where I never want to talk again. That’s on me. We’re both smartasses — you’re just smarter. Sometimes I want to feel smart too.

ME:

We have danced this same loop for years — one of us too blunt, the other too precise. He wants to be heard; I want to be understood. Neither of us ever quite wins.

If you want to be the smartest person in the room, do the work (and no, playing Borderlands is not going to do the job you want it to) .

HIM:

We start with a small thing, and suddenly I’m lost in confusion because you flipped the script again. It’s a horrible spiral.

ME:

We have a script?

Maybe he cannot keep up.

HIM:

This isn’t something to analyse, okay? Just something to understand. 🖤

ME:

He says that every time. And every time, I analyse it anyway. Because that is how I love people — by trying to make sense of them, even when they make no sense at all.

In summary: 

We have known each other for over fifteen years.

Our friendship has survived worse things than a comic book feud — and better stories have started from smaller misunderstandings.

Maybe that is the real core of it:

You can love someone’s chaos and still crave peace.

You can hold space for both the rant and the reflection.

Sometimes friendship is not about harmony.

It is about staying, even when the noise is ridiculous.

And learning the definition of words you bring to a throw down. Rude: offensively impolite or bad-mannered. 

Rude does not mean disagreeing with your opinion and bruising your pride.