bees + bad personalities

“Look at me.”

The bees I had brought with me in my mind to help me listen to all that was wrong with me melted away and I brought my chin up, alone. My eyes reluctantly rose to meet her steely green ones.

We held like that, her seated and me standing in her court.

When she felt it was enough, she blew out all of her disappointment and turned away in disgust.

“I don’t know what it is, but I just see something in you that troubles me. It’s like…” she paused, struggling to find the words for her distaste, “you have a bad personality or something.”

The silent impact in my chest felt most like a laugh: that moment of shock when someone on TV is hit by a bus; it isn’t funny, but laughing relieves.

Laughing would not be wise.

The words came back in focus in time for, “You have all of this opportunity, and you just waste it. If I had had half of the opportunities you have when I was a teenager, I would have been overjoyed. Someday you will see that. You never stick with anything; it’s just pure laziness. You. Are. Lazy.”

My eyes had returned to my hands, which hung intertwined, browned from hours in the sun spent training my project horse, nimble from holding a pencil, a pen, a guitar, a shovel, a barbed wire stretcher. Yes, lazy.

“Well? What do you have to say to that?”

What is there to say? I shrugged, knowing it would cause her eyebrows to jump before they did.

“Huh?”

“I don’t think I’m lazy.”

“You didn’t want to play guitar at the 4-H group; you just want to sit on the sidelines and waste your God-given talent.”

“I don’t like playing the guitar in front of people.” Truthfully, I didn’t like playing the guitar at all.

My heels were beginning to tire of the hard floor. I wondered if I was beginning to wear an imprint on this spot, the weight of her words bowing the floorboards.

The bees returned to listen to many minutes on squandering natural ability by being a follower and being a poor servant of God, then swarmed away so that “You’re an under-achiever,” could land squarely in my chest.

She turned fully to her computer and began to type in earnest, jaw still shifted to the right in repugnance. I was dismissed; I turned miserably and carried my bones back to my room.

Pulling my cat into my lap, I focused once more on perfecting my biology project. I hoped to raise my grade in the class from 98% to 100% with the extra credit option. My teacher at the co-op wrote nice notes on post-it’s when she handed back assignments she liked.