text: “All is fair in Love and War” I may or may not have several mental issues that originated from my Middle school and High school times of which I am highly ashamed of. I was a very dumb kid, like impressively naive and hopeful. Many of my friends would say they were the same way and that it’s not worth thinking about, but I just can’t stop thinking back on my younger self with nothing but harsh judgement toward him. My first kinda real relationship I had was... not successful to say the least. It was back in Middle school so it was bound to fail, but it’s easy to be blind to imminent failure when your hormones are off the charts and you believe you’re on the brink of striking gold. Her name is Murphy. Murphy was kind of “the hoe of Pendleton”, which is a sad and concerning title to have at 13. I didn’t know that though, and it probably wouldn’t change what I thought about her very much if I did, it’s just food for thought and a little important to mention. Most of that relationship isn’t really worth talking about. We met, she had a crush on me, nobody liked me so knowing someone liked me like that won me over, blah blah blah, dating. You couldn’t even really call it dating though, we never went out together other than to smoke weed. No parks, or dinners together, we just ate frozen food, junk food, laid around in my room smoking weed and constantly having sex. After 2 months of “dating” she told me she had cheated on me but it was when she was drunk and that she loves me. I kind of shoulda seen that coming because she cheated on a different guy to get with me, but I was also 13 and very romantically influenced by whatever dumb HollyWood movies I was watching at the time, so it felt like we were vigilantes of romance, or at least I felt like a vigilante. Instead of breaking off the relationship after that violation of trust, I believed she still loved me and shrugged off the emotional damage that caused. She proceeded to cheat on me two more times in our one year relationship, one of those times being with my bestfriend at the time. After that bad experience dating and smoking a brain damaging amount of weed during that, I found myself paranoid and untrusting of everyone unless given an unhealthy amount of reassurance. I still need it to this day, less now than before, but I still find myself uncomfortable even in rock solid relationships if I’m not given a weird amount of reassurance. I’m not very bothered by that though, what I’m more bothered about is the ending of that relationship. Toward the end she told me for the third time that she had cheated on me again and that she was sorry. I was seething with a full range of negative feelings, some really vile, toxic shit, but instead of breaking up with her and distancing myself from that mess, I told her it was fine. The very next day I cheated on her, then a week later I broke up with her after I told her what I did in the most unapologetic way possible. The first and only time I really took pride in being an asshole. I turned into the thing I hated most, something that to me was unredeemable in any scenario, I had done out of spite. Some hear it and say “All is fair in Love and War” then tell me what I did was bad but justifiable, but to me there is no justifying that. She didn’t sink me down to her level, I got there all by myself, she just showed me how easy it is to fight fire with fire. That’s Pendleton for ya though. Everyone wants to leave this place and it’s obvious why. Pendleton is just a sad hole in the ground that turns everyone rotten, maybe not as rotten as Murphy, or maybe more. You can’t really predict how negatively this place will affect someone, all you can really know is that this place is cursed, and just being here for even a moment will guarantee that you lose a bit of your niceness. Or if you don’t have any of that, you’ll just become like the main majority of Pendleton. Mad, untrusting, and mentally feral. This is the first thing I’ve written in a while so it’s not very great, but I’m proud of it. I’ve used a fake name to protect the person I wrote about, but they know who they are.