Everybody's got interesting stories to tell. We've been through a lot in our lives that if written down and compiled into a book, everybody feels that their story would stand a great chance against the non-fiction best seller at a famous book store. Everyone would admit that they have been through a lot -if not more than others- and they deserve to be given respect due to the difficulties that they have been through.Their lives are one undoubtedly one of the saddest, most awe-inspiring, or even funniest and note-worthy as compared to others.
I have and has been through a simple and boring life. Nothing really interesting happened to me all these years. The most interesting thing was probably that I had entered (and failed at the early stages) a nation-wide reality TV singing competition. That was really it. Unlike some people whose lives are full of drama, mine was pretty monotonous. I never had been struck by lightning, nor possibly terminal disease or sickness like cancer or leukemia, nor have I done anything great that may land my name as a front-page news.
I am not complaining. I am very thankful to have been given a stable, normal albeit boring life.
But what's with the title of this post?
Well, I have a friend whose life is so colourful that if it was drawn on a canvas, it'd look like a painting paint with 7 brushes of different colours brushed all together at the same time. This friend is a few years younger than I am but he is much smarter. He has a bright expression on his face all the time, and he is very polite.
This friend of mine is a very good looking guy, inside and out. On the outside, he is a fair straight-haired, soft-spoken, petite guy with a generous smile that brightens me up even when I am in the worst mood ever. He is the 4th child out of 5, and he has a younger brother and also three older sisters. His fragile build with a distinctive aura of innocence (I can't believe I just used the A word) has always made me want to be a big brother over him. I feel ever so compelled to protect him and guide and nurture him as I would do to my 7-year old youngest brother. It all clicked into the right places actually. He didn't have an older brother, and his father wasn't always around. Hence, for the first time in his life, he had an older brother: me.
We came to meet at the mall where I worked and he was a customer who bought the things that I was selling. I got so many good friends who were customers at first. What can I say, I am so charming, too charming for my own good. Just joking. He was so eager about the stuff his eldest sister was buying for him for his birthday and as a treat for the success of getting great grades for his SPM. I told him at that time, he was very lucky to have a sister who buys things for him. I am a first born, and had no older brother or sister to ask anything from. Since there are seven of us, well...
We became friends on facebook and exchanged phone numbers and became really close friends. I found out later that he was a wonderful person who came from a wonderful family. He reminded me a lot of myself or rather a perfect form of myself, a persona who I aspire so much to be; innocent, brilliant, smart, kind, handsome and so much more.
Is there such a perfect person?
On the sixth month of our relationship, I began to sense that his stories about his deeds weren't adding up. When I did some thinking, his stories were many times contradicting each other in many terms. Some of the stories included overlapping timeline that was impossible.
Being the evil person that I am, of course I did some digging.
To check whether his stories were true or not, I didn't confront him directly. I continued to ''buy'' his stories no matter what he told me. He once even told me that he was in the national squad of a sport and he had once represented the country to an international event. The first thing I wanted to do was of course to do a cross-reference to all of his stories. Hence, I planned a visit to his house and informed him about it. He was very reluctant about this that when I insisted, he just stopped talking to me for a week.
His house and his family would provide an opportunity for me to validate all of his great stories. He knew that. That's why he was against the idea of visiting his family. Data on his facebook account also indicated that his stories just don't add up. I stopped my investigation, and went on to the second phase, which was to dig the truth out of him.
The formula is simple; the more you open up to people, the more people will open up to you. This is the most basic friendship formula that people use, but don't realize. To get someone to open up about something, you must carefully lead a conversation into the specific topic, relate to the topic to your own experience, gain the person's trust, sometimes, opening up about embarrassing stories about yourself would take down his wall of defense as well, and it is all about how we time it.
I feel so evil writing all this. To be continued later okay? Hehehehe
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