** It Was Not Envy (no singer) Finished *contact me at: Shinhwa_jjang@hotmail.com A cousin…  Someone that you fight with, but you love.  Sometimes you’re close with them; sometimes, you pretend that you don’t even know them.  Sometimes you long for them; sometimes, you want them to leave.  That’s what a cousin is.  But not to me. To me, a cousin is someone I always fight with, that I absolutely hate.  I'm never close with them, and I don’t WANT to know her.  I never long for them, and I always want her to leave.  In other words, I hate my own cousin. People might think it’s impossible.  But it’s not, because it happened to me.  I hate my own family.  When I told this to my friends, they would always say that it was jealousy.  But it wasn’t; I just plainly hated her… no, not dislike strongly… HATE! I was happy that I lived in New Jersey and she lived in California.  When I visited her, her dark, tanned skin made me sick.  It was so dark, I couldn’t even tell a tree from her.  A tree… that was a pretty good description of her.  Skinny, dark, twisted, weird-looking.  That’s what I thought.  But others didn’t think that way.  They thought of her as slender, graceful, tanned beautifully, and wonderful.  Now that I think of it, I hate trees.  So much like my cousin.  Then, one day, the worst news hit me.  She was moving to New Jersey.  I denied the fact.  This wasn’t possible.  But I figured that since I would hate her, all my friends would too. But it wasn’t true.  My friends weren’t even my friends.  They all turned their backs on me.  They took sides with my cousin.  I hated her more than ever.  But I kept it all in… I never said a word.  I just smiled and was a good sport about it. She even took my place as teacher’s pet.  I was failing all my classes.  Except art, which was my favorite.  I was getting D’s and F’s, while she was getting A+’s by “working her butt” off to carry worksheets into class, copy them, and even correct them.  I hated her more than ever.  But I still kept it all in.   I still kept my mouth shut.  I was failing my life.  No friends, bad grades, and even my parents favored my cousin over me.  But I still had one hope left… My boyfriend, Brian.  He was so sweet to me during those hard times.  He helped me with my math homework… helped me keep my grades up.  He stayed out late with me, right until curfew, so I didn’t get in trouble.  My parents even loved him.  But unfortunately, so did my cousin. Wonderful, wasn’t it?  One day, Brian says to me that he doesn’t like me anymore.  He likes… *Dum duh dum* my cousin.  I blew up… right then, right there.  I hated my cousin.  She took everything away from me.  Why didn’t she just kill me?  It would be so much easier for her and me.  So I told her… asked her why she didn’t kill me…  Why she didn’t just take a knife and stab me in the heart.  Like she always did… But she just smiled and said, “Sometimes, the best girls gets the best things.”  I was furious.  I ran out.  I went into a hotel.  No one cared about me.  I drank every night.  I came home, drunk, not even knowing that I had walked home… or rode the bus… or once in awhile, the person that I had been drinking with drove me to my house.  Unexpectedly, one day, a very close friend of mine came to see me.  She asked me what was wrong… and told me to go back home.  But I didn’t listen to her.  I told her everything.  I couldn’t help myself… I was drunk, like always. She told me I was jealous.  It was envy pouring into my pure, clean heart.  But it was too late.  I was already caught up with the “disease of envy.”   But I denied it again.  I wasn’t jealous of her!  I just hated her!  She left… she gave up…  I gave up, too. I went back home.  I went back to my cousin.  I poured out my heart in front of her.  She stared at me with pitiful eyes.  Like she felt sorry for me.  She had no right!  She was the one that took everything away from me.  I felt sorry for her, because she couldn’t get anything herself!  I looked her in the eye and said, “AND I AM NOT JEALOUS OF YOU!” Her response… shocked me…  She said, “I know that.  I'm jealous of you.”  I was shocked.  Me?  Scrawny, tall for her age, stupid, clumsy, mean me?  Why was she jealous of me?  I asked her.  She quietly replied, “You have everything.  Friends that care, parents that love, boyfriend that’s always there, even teachers that care, and you’re popular.  And you’re loved.” I stared at her in the eye like she was some freak.  Tears filled them, and filled mine as well.  We hugged… embraced each other like we never did before.  We never had even touched before this moment.  I loved her.  She moved back to California.  A week later, news came.  My cousin had died from cancer.  My parents told me the shocking truth.  Both of her parents have had cancer.  They died when she was 6, leaving her in the care of our grandmother.  Everyone else in our family was told that her parents had died in a car crash.  And my cousin had cancer too.  She knew it.  She tried to hide it, and did very well.  In the two months with her, I learned more than forty years of schooling would teach me.  I loved my cousin.  I never hated her.  It was just a phase… a phase of jealousy.  I HAD been jealous of my cousin.  Because she took everything that I had.  I had them… and she wanted them… So she was jealous of me.  It was her… it had been obvious, but I had failed to see it.  The truth was that I WAS jealous of her.  And she was jealous of me.  We were both jealous of each other, while in that time; we could have been the closest cousins in the world. I still regret it.  I could have loved her… known her better before she died.  I wish, even now, that I had told her everything before… When she first took my friends.  It would have been the best for her and me.  Then… I wouldn’t have this feeling…  that my “pure, clean” heart was too deeply drenched in the envy… and the jealousy.  The feeling… that I would never try to be jealous of someone… I would just simply love them for being better than me.    End *****************************************