The World Is Ugly

My best friend was gay.

And I envied her, actually, for being so open about it. She was bullied every day for something she had absolutely no choice in, and it baffled me how she could end every day with the same beautiful smile on her face. Tiffany was just sort of this amazing contradiction. I really couldn’t comprehend it. She was ridiculed and poked fun at, yet she still laughed and smiled. She was the most religious person I knew, yet she was, well, gay. I even asked her one day, “Fany-ah, how can you stand it?”

She smiled that damned smile at me and answered my question, rather cutely, if I say so myself. “Stand what?”

“Being hated so much,” I told her bluntly. She raised her eyebrows in shock and was quite speechless for a couple seconds before softly smiling at me again.

She always smiled, I realized, and I came to the conclusion that behind her smiles, maybe she was hurt and maybe that was why she smiled all the time.

“Well,” she started as she stared at me tenderly, “Daddy doesn’t hate me, Jessica and Sunny and Yuri and Hyoyeon and Sooyoung and Yoona and Seohyun don’t hate me,” she replied with a chuckle. “Do you hate me?”

I shook my head almost immediately. “Of course not!”

She grinned at me once again, and for some reason I just knew this one was real. “Then that’s one less person that hates me.” I stared back at her blankly and she let out another laugh. “There’s so much hate in this world TaeTae…but there’s so much more than that too. Those are the parts I choose to focus on, not the hate or the bullying or anything else. Just the good parts, like you and everyone else.”

It was then and there I decided that the world was ugly. It was the only reasonable conclusion because how could people hate such a beautiful person, inside and out, like Tiffany?

The world was ugly.

A couple months later, I realized that there was another reason I envied Tiffany so much for being so open about being gay.

I was unable to do the same.

And when I had finally mustered up the courage to do the same, everything came crashing down.

“TaeTae…”

“No, Fany! I’m not the same as you, you know that? I can’t take all the bullying and the teasing – my own parents have stopped talking to me for goodness sakes! I just…I’m stuck like this, aren’t I? I’m stuck in a body that I hate, stuck as a person that can’t even accept oneself…”

And she smiled that god damned beautiful smile at me again.

“Everyone feels like crap every once in a while, like what you’re doing isn’t amounting to anything, like you aren’t doing anything remarkable. I’m not going to tell you that everything is going to be okay, or that things will get better, or that I know how you feel. Because I don’t know that, I don’t know if everything will be okay or if things will get better, and I certainly don’t know how you feel.

But, I can promise you something, at least. I can promise you that you’ll have a hand to hold and a shoulder to cry on. I can’t promise that I’ll make you feel better, but I can promise you that I’ll be here, and I hope you can offer me the same.”

She hugged me and stayed with me until I stopped crying that day.

The world was ugly, but, I suppose, it had its moments.

“Should I kill myself?”

I expected her to freak out and scream at me, but her gaze remained fixed on the menu.

“I’d really rather you not,” she answered quietly.

“Why not?”

“Because I’d miss you and cry a whole lot.”

I frowned at the thought of Tiffany crying. “Well, I won’t then. I wouldn’t want to make you cry.” I stared outside the window to see a woman being mugged in broad daylight. “But haven’t you thought it at all, Fany-ah? I mean, look at the world around us.”

She finally looked up from the menu and there was something about the way she looked at me. She looked frightened, but of what? I had no idea. “What do you mean TaeTae?” she asked me quietly, and I wondered what was wrong and why she didn’t have that smile on her face and why she wasn’t being as loud as she usually was.

“The world is ugly,” I told her. “I know you don’t think so, but I do. I see the way people treat you and I hate it. I hate how people hate for no good reason, and I hate how people hurt others for no good reason. I just hate it all, Fany-ah.”

“Do you hate me, then?”

“I could never.”

Then she smiled that damned smile and I felt a little more relieved. Just a little.

“Do you think I’m ugly?”

“Of course not.”

“Then, maybe the whole world isn’t ugly, Taeyeon-ah.”

And I pondered over what she had just told me for a good minute. I stared at her and I smiled back.

“Maybe you’re right.”

I looked back outside to see the same woman lying hurt on the floor and frowned.

“But most of it is.”

I caught her crying once.

I didn’t know and I wasn’t sure what to do. She was the one that usually comforted me, so when the roles were switched I stood there confusedly and I felt my heart ache at the sight of such a beautiful angel crying.

“Fany-ah,” I found myself saying. She looked up at me with those teary eyes. I held out a hand to her. “I’m here.”

She laughed and I shot her a toothy grin before pulling her into a hug.

When she stopped crying she did the most wonderful thing.

She kissed me.

“You seem happier lately,” a friend told me one day. I grinned and nodded.

“That’s because I am.”

“Well that’s good. You were always so depressed…what happened?”

“Some people have turned against the world as a result of observation and experience of horrible events. They’ve allowed all the negativity of the world to let their hearts turn cold. I’ve learned that those experiences shouldn’t be an incentive for you to hate the world; if anything, it should serve as an incentive for you to be better than that.

I will admit that, most of the time, the world is ugly.”

My eyes locked onto Tiffany across the room.

“But, sometimes, my god is it beautiful. I’ve come to learn that even when the bad moments outweigh the good, it doesn’t make the good moments any less amazing.”