Dear Jackie,
I’ve been staring at this page for three minutes and I still don’t know how to start. How do you start spilling your guts to the one person who has the power to hurt you most? Treat it like a story and pretend it’s someone else, not you? I think that’s what I’m doing now, I’m not sure though. It’s confusing, to say the least. Right now I’m sitting in the tent while you all gather round the trangie. I don’t think you realize I’m not there. Maybe when it comes to washing up time you will. I don’t know.
I think I understand now when you say how you constantly need something occupying your mind, distracting you from thinking. There’s none of that here. I keep thinking and thinking and getting more depressed by the minute. And I know I won’t be able to tell you this to your face, I probably never will anyway. I just need to write it all down somewhere, I feel like I’m about to explode. Basically, I don’t understand how you can say you care about me so much, how I make you happy, and still treat me like this. I don’t… I don’t want to say this, but I seriously don’t know how much more of this I can take. You make me happier than anyone else, but you also make me more miserable than anyone else, and you don’t seem to care.
You say you care, but you seem to want to be with anyone else more, even Phoebe. I wanted to spend time with you, this camp, but it seems I can’t spend more than 5 minutes around you without you shooing me away. I keep saying I want to be with you, because I care about you more than anyone else, and you just look at me weirdly and walk away. I try to hug you and you shove me off. When forming groups and I say I want Jackie, you say I want Emma. In the tents, you say I want Mikaela, and when I try to go next to you, you say you want the side. I feel stupid for pushing, when it’s obvious you don’t want anything to do with me, but all I want is to be near you, I don’t care anything else.
I fell unwanted, worthless… I don’t know. I want you to care about me as much as I care about you, and I want you to show it. I feel like skum, dirt, while you cuddle up to Bella, rest your head on her shoulder, and leave me in cold. I know you say you’re not good at showing emotion, but you do it with Bella. You’re continuously asking if she’s okay, or if she needs anything. Maybe I’m being stupidly jealous, but why don’t you do any of that for me? I know I’m a wimp, I know I get scared over stupid things, but hell, I got really, really scared over all those things, and you didn’t care in the slightest. You said I was stupid for feeling scared, that it was nothing.
When Bella was scared, it was understandable, it was okay, she was allowed to be scared and you comforted her. But when I’m scared it’s completely different. You dismiss it, completely. You didn’t even know I’d capsized my kayak and you looked at me with such disdain when I was crying. When I crashed my bike I was so scared and it hurt so much, and then I couldn’t stop crying, not just because it hurt, but because you wouldn’t look at me and you didn’t care. I can’t help being a wuss, but I think I would have been a lot braver if you had showed me it was okay.
And now, I don’t know. All through camp I was thinking this has to stop, I can’t keep letting you treat me like this, I can’t deal with it anymore. But then on the bus, and although you still treated me badly, you’d occasionally smile at me, and I’d remember what it was like before, and how happy you make me, and how much I love you and I thought that I couldn’t give up on this, that I can’t live without it. I don’t know. I’m so confused, unsure. I don’t know which way to turn. I can’t stand the thought of loosing you, but I think back to camp and how you treated me and I can’t stand the thought of living like that. So, I don’t know. I guess I’ll keep drifting for a little while longer.
~Elsa