People

People who need people are the luckiest people in the world. Or maybe not.

I do need people in my life, but I have one of those irascible personalities that has a life all its own and sometimes when I'm with people they think I'm being quiet when I'm really wrestling with that inner me. These smiles can be smiles of steel, holding back annoyance and testy comments I cannot allow to get out.

I realize that no one agrees with anyone one hundred percent, but there are people out there who bring out the worst in me and I'm starting to find that as I age I need to avoid them. Maybe not so much because of who they are, but who I am when I am with them.

You might tell me that these people are here to teach me something, or that I will be a better person for spending time with them, or whatever people who like suffering tell other people, but the main thing I have learned is that together we are like a perpetual angst machine. We are like fire and water, sun and rain, lions and lambs, and one of us might eat the other if we ever let our hair down and let it all hang out.

Now I do have to admit that most people do not affect me this way. Only a few that I have known for years and years and who are so deeply entrenched in their own abysses that there are never any surprises, or hope. The unfortunate thing is that these are actually people I love. They are fam-I-lee so to speak.

And that only makes it worse.