The Last Time I Hated Someone

When I was seven years old, my family moved to Mexico City. I was a tall and lanky kid. I wasn’t fond of brushing my hair, so I sported an afro of sorts. I wore glasses that were two sizes too big for my head. My head was two sizes too big for my body. The rims of the glasses were dark black. The lenses were like the bottoms of Coke bottles. Just not green. Did I mention tall? Yeah, I was about two sizes too big, period.

I used to ride the bus to school with my older brother. He’s five years older than me, so, naturally, he took to protecting me. He did a wonderful job of sticking up for his little brother. Looking the way I did, there was a lot of sticking to be done. He got really good at it. There was one kid in particular who decided he wanted to help the new kids, so he made it his mission, for several years, to help my brother become a better stick-up-for-his-Frankenstein-looking-little-brother kinda guy. I grew to hate that kid. He was older than me, older than my brother, and he insisted on…well…just being a pain in the ass. A mean, son-of-a-bitch, pain in the ass. I hated that kid.

When I was about 14, I was riding in the car with my father one day when we came upon some sort of disturbance in the road. We were coming down a hill towards a particularly dangerous “glorieta” (a circular median or roundabout). There were cars stopped there. Underneath one of those cars, there was a bicycle. On the ground, in the street, just to the right of the bike, there was a person. He was hurt. Badly. He jumped to his feet. As my father drove the car around the circular median, I saw the person who had jumped up from the street. He was limping badly yet hoping with pain. I can’t explain what that looked like. All I know is that I could FEEL that kid’s pain. Really FEEL it. Did I say kid? Yeah, it was a kid. At one point, my father’s car was directly across the median from this kid, and the kid looked into our car. His eyes were like dinner plates, and there was such intense fear in them. Thinking about it now tightens my stomach. There was blood running down his face from some gash hidden by his hair. There was blood on his shirt, his arms, one leg. I think he had shorts on. When he looked in the car, I looked at his eyes, at the fear, then I looked at his face. It was that kid from the bus, the one I hated.

The exchange between us lasted maybe a second or two. My dad’s car cruised passed the scene. My dad said something. Maybe it was a “bendito” for the poor kid who’d gotten into that terrible accident. I can’t be sure what he said because my stomach was a knot, and my heart sank deep inside my chest. There was a part of me that wanted to tell my dad to stop the car, to turn around, to back up…to do something. Because when he looked in the car, he recognized me, too. I know he saw me. I think he did. I mean, he did, but I think he saw ME, saw me and knew who I was.

But I said nothing. It made me sick. It makes me sick.

When I got home, I think I went to my room and cried. Maybe I didn’t. I can’t really remember for sure. It’s been a long time. All I know is that I thought about that kid that I hated. I thought about him and how much of a wretched human being I thought he was. I thought about how miserable he had made me. I thought about all the times I wished I could beat the crap out of him. I thought about how much I hated him.

Except I didn’t hate him anymore.

That moment is burned in my mind. I see his face right now. I can see the accident, the glorieta. I could take you there now. More than anything, at that moment, my childish, selfish, unenlightened need to hate that kid disappeared. He went from being some monster in my head to a human being.

Just. Like. Me.

That moment change my life forever. It was the moment that I came to a simple yet profound realization:

We are all just people; people with the same range of emotions, of feelings.

We all feel pain. We all feel fear. We all suffer. We all feel relief. We all feel joy. We all…feel.

That was the last time I hated someone.