Alcomvick

Resentment

It’s the same reason you duck from a baseball, or pull back from a flame. When you’re frightened your brain releases a cocktail of hormones to initiate the fight or flight mechanism. You jump up as a neural reflex to kick start your heart rate, releasing adrenaline, allowing for quicker blood-flow to useful muscles and faster breathing for more oxygen. Pupils dilate to allow more light and peripheral vision increases to improve awareness. Digestive, immune, and all other systems that are deemed non-essential shut down. You scream as a defense mechanism to either scare away the threat or notify others that you’re in danger. Whatever the case, this is not a drill.
Or at least not supposed to be. But it is, and for the third time the threat diminishes, and the body releases cortisol to calm itself back to normal. And as she hurls with laughter from yet another successful attempt of accessing a reflex- The same one that keeps an animal in the wild from becoming lunch- I think to myself how unfair it is for my body to be teased at survival. And now I can feel myself becoming enraged with her, wanting to hurt, wanting to punish. Survival has transcended into comfortability, and now it must work to achieve complacency. Lips fixed, eyes stern, shoulders low; the relaxation of negligence shrouds my otherwise cheerful mood, and I show her that she has outdone her usefulness. Condoning such behavior the first time around was my downfall. She has undermined a sense of camaraderie for vacuous enjoyment, and all I can conjure up are the visions of a revenge taken without remorse. In order to relieve this burden of unnecessary humiliation, and to console my resentment. I feign amusement but keep quiet. The room falls victim to the sweet sensation of newly formed tension and she wanders off with the bitter taste of my hostility. I know her game has ended. Bitch.