Tania Rojas

I never liked Tania. It wasn't because of her apple-cheeked protagonism. And wasn't because I was jealous of her either. 

She was decent looking, but not who someone would call pretty. She had voluminous hair and a nice body, but that was about it. What pulled people in was her boisterous personality. She was cheerful and outgoing. And when she was angry, she was fierce and straightforward. She talked too loud and giggled at bad jokes. 

But she never stopped to think about anyone other than herself. She tried too hard to be friends with people, and in our city, where people just wanted to be left alone, this was not accepted very well. She found a lot of amusement in little kids who fell from cycles or slides and went about littering as she pleased, claiming that it was the sweeper's job to clean it up.

Her mother called me, one day. Alarmed, I tried to think about any reason she would call me, and came up with nothing. No matter my distaste for her, I would never openly express it to her unless she gave me a reason to. 

"Hello?" I had asked, and her mother almost sobbed. What I'd gathered from her emotional outburst was that she couldn't handle her life. Her job required her to be available at the odd hours of the day, and the lack of sleep and irregular eating patterns were caring ho to her. Tania wasn't making things any easier. She would leave the house at night and come back in the wee hours of the morning without informing anyone of her whereabouts. While her worried mother would search for her, she would lazily stroll about unknown places and cut her mother off when she tried to reach out to her. 

"I don't know what to do with her anymore," her mother wailed. "Sometimes when I try to talk to her, she tells me 'If dad were here, he would have let me do what I wanted to do. Now tell me, what can I say to that?"

I couldn't give her an answer. I didn't know why I was the one Tania's mother had called, but I felt the aching need to soothe her pain somehow. I couldn't imagine how great of distress she must've been in, to have called me, a mere eighteen-year-old acquaintance to her daughter, who had met her about a grand total of once. 

I never liked Tania, but consciously or unconsciously, I had made the decision to tame her, if not for the sake of everyone else, then for her poor mother. 

That is how I ended up befriending Tania Rojas.