The oxymoron equation
by Bethany Cutkomp
Image by Cottonbro Studio for Pexels
I am a mosaic composed of contradictions: I still love the people I will never forgive. I’ve made terrible decisions with good intentions. I am capable of compassion and anger—they coexist within me.
Conflict is what fuels the oxymoron. Allowing opposites to share the same space generates a new definition of its own. While seemingly counterproductive, this dissonance proves to be common both in our vocabulary and our everyday lives.
For years, I refused to accept the tug-o-war pull of opposing sentiments. How come people’s actions didn’t match their words? How did one of my closest friendships hurt me the most? How is it possible for love to be expressed in a cruel manner? Why couldn’t I let go of the people that mistreated me?
Perhaps there is a solution within the oxymoron. I have dissected repelling variables and sewn them back together in search of what is right and wrong. Ultimately, the conclusion I’ve come to is messy. It’s uncomfortable. It walks the line between logic and senselessness.
The truth I’d been seeking all along wasn’t exactly a solution at all.
ONE: Identifying the variables
During humid nights when the trees screamed to life with cicada discourse, my housemate and I scrambled into his beat-up vehicle and took long drives through our small rural college town. Gravel roads drew us in like gravity. Streetlights swapped places with dark, thick woods. With the windows down, we challenged the hiss of wind in our ears with his stereo. My friend’s playlist was a cocktail of genres, yielding surprise with every tune.
When we were alone together, we let our guards down to appreciate our unpopular tastes. A mutual favorite of ours was Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Op. 36, otherwise known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. We looped the second movement, Lento e Largo - Tranquillissimo, cranking the volume as high as the stereo would allow. A haunting soprano voice sang of despair, backed by an orchestra that swelled and decayed in intensity.
My friend drove without speaking, soaking in the enchanting concoction of melody and insect chirps. I absorbed our close proximity, the giddy adrenaline of meandering with one of my favorite people. As a firm believer of love in all forms, I truly thought that I had found my platonic soulmate. He pushed me out of my comfort zone to reach my fullest potential. We shared our most vulnerable sides and listened to each other. I needed him and he needed me in return—a strong reciprocal bond that I’d never shared with another person.
The headlights of a passing vehicle illuminated the tears glistening down my cheeks. My friend pulled over to the side of the road and turned the volume down.
“Are you alright?” he asked, alarmed. “I can turn it off if it’s too sad for you.”
I shook my head. It wasn’t that. Yes, the song was devastating, but it was gorgeous. Its melody breathed with crests of euphoria and troughs of melancholy. I was enamored by the contradicting emotions surging and ebbing within my ears.
For a fraction of a second, the look on my friend’s face was indiscernible. He appeared utterly confused, as if discovering a stranger in his own car.
He shook his head with a laugh. “You make me want to die.”
My gut twitched. His light tone didn’t match those ugly words, not initially. He would tell me later that he was “just joking,” but his words still hurt. He’d say that he cared about me before slamming his door and ignoring me for days. I was told to grow up but would be babied and talked down to. His friends told me to leave him alone but would talk trash about me behind my back. I didn’t know what to make of such contradictions. The more I questioned them, the deeper of a hole we dug for ourselves.
Joining two conflicting words into the oxymoron was powerful, and we hid behind them like shields. My friend excused his condescending remarks as “brutal honesty.” I figured he was being “cruel to be kind.” It was the only way I knew how to dismiss his unpredictability when we weren’t in public.
I thought I was overthinking our friendship. After our exchanges escalated to crying and shutting each other out, I wrote a list of reasons why he didn’t despise me. He used to visit my dorm every night. We were swing dance partners, hiking pals, study buddies. He knew my fast-food orders by heart. We’ve given each other tours of our childhood homes. He texted me reminders to take care of myself. We exchanged songs that reminded us of each other.
The list went on, which later proved to do more harm than good. The most significant reason I didn’t give up on him was because he didn’t give up on me. Our forgiveness often went without words, leading us back to each other. Sitting shoulder to shoulder on the couch, we got drunk to our favorite childhood movies and shared the most vulnerable sides of ourselves.
“I know I can be hard on you sometimes,” he whispered, breath heavy with liquor. “I just want you to be tougher so you’ll be okay. Then I’ll be okay.”
“Sometimes it seems like you hate me,” I admitted, pouring myself another drink.
“You’re stupid for thinking that. You’re my best friend.”
“It’s hard to tell when you’re joking. I love you though.”
He paused, gaze glued to the blank television screen ahead. “I hope it doesn’t hurt your feelings when I don’t say it back.”
I shrugged. “I love people without expecting to be loved in return.”
This was a truth I prided myself in. No matter how ugly things got between me and a loved one, I wouldn’t let myself go bitter. I’d find more positives to outweigh their negatives if it meant keeping them happy.
“That’s so sad,” he spoke after a stretch of silence.
“Not really,” I said. But it was a little.
TWO: Isolating the variables
In the months that followed, our rental house was quiet. Music and laughter no longer stirred the air. Grief pulsed through the fissured plaster walls. Nobody had died, but mourning our friendship had stripped the life out of us both. My housemate and I only left our rooms for campus, the bathroom, or the kitchen. I barely left my bed—it wasn’t worth witnessing my friend refuse to make eye contact.
In the midst of it all, I thought something was wrong with me. Perhaps my sadness had stripped the kindness from my best friend. I allowed him to expose my deepest wounds but he gave up on me when my healing progress didn’t match the pace he’d anticipated. He had his own pain to handle, but I absorbed it so that he didn’t have to suffer alone. The way we approached empathy and coping were polar opposites from each other, and that constant friction lit match after match of distress.
My apologies only fueled his irritability, but my accusations sparked a bitter, defensive side that refused to take accountability. No matter how much of myself I sacrificed to win back his affection, he drifted further away from me.
I’d grown up on the phrase “tough love.” Stern treatment was affection in disguise. I raised my voice at you because I love you. I’m only hard on you to help you in the long run. Perhaps it was this oxymoron that taught me to be passive, to succumb to the critical voices of people I appreciated.
If we isolate one half of the oxymoron’s polarized words, the phrase loses its significance. After enduring weeks of mixed signals and hurt feelings, I finally pried the love from that equation. That left me to grapple with the remaining truth: this friendship was simply tough.
Winter afternoons sapped the light filtered through our curtains. Wrapping myself in a blanket, I braved the dark to confront my housemate in person. When he shoved the front door open and sped past to avoid interacting, my confidence wavered.
“If you hate me, then just say it already,” I called to him. “I don’t know what I did this time, but I can make things better, I swear.”
“Fix yourself,” he deadpanned, disappearing into his room with a slam.
I deflated. On the couch, I put in my earbuds and filled my head with that symphony. While it initially sounded beautifully miserable, only the misery sang to me that time.
My phone lit up with a text. Turn off that goddamn song, I can hear it from here. I have an exam tomorrow morning and you’re making me have a panic attack.
Icy regret sliced through my chest. Why didn’t you tell me? I would have left!
Where would you go? Walking around alone in the dark again? I really don’t have time to worry about you all night. A minute went by. And stop fucking crying, you’re being pathetic.
I’m sorry, I replied, wiping my face. I hadn’t been aware of the tears dripping off my nose.
Be better. The only way you’re going to get over your mental illness is to stop being weak.
Okay, sorry. No response. Are you free tomorrow night? I can make things right between us. It’ll be just like old times, I promise.
Stop texting me.
I had no idea what to do. If he refused to take responsibility for his actions but my apologies held no weight, there’d never be a resolution. We’d be stuck in this silent stalemate for the remaining months of our lease.
Mutual friends were aware of the situation but fell for my housemate’s charismatic mask. The tale he spun about our friendship depicted me as miserably unstable. I reached out to them privately to ask them for the support they promised me, but they had already made up their minds.
I know you’re going through a really hard time, hon, but we can’t tolerate this anymore. We are all allowed to be depressed, not just you. I’m sorry that you feel lonely but I think this is something that you need to deal with on your own.
Shortly after that message, they never spoke to me again. All because I reacted to abuse that they instigated.
In my mind, love and anger existed on opposite ends of a spectrum. I chose anger—at the time, it was the only logical answer to a hopeless situation. I copied his actions, shattering glass bottles for the sake of breaking something. In passing, I mimicked his condescending phrases. I stripped the house of my belongings because I didn’t feel welcome in my own living space.
I hated how anger manifested and made me feel like a villain. It was so much easier to shift the blame onto myself and move on, but I wanted my housemate to be sorry for the way he treated me. Any hint of regret would validate the months of pain that he put me through.
But to my disbelief, he chuckled and called me a hypocrite.
It was then that I isolated the hate from our love-hate relationship.
THREE: Embracing the variables
I’ve rewritten this story dozens of times in an attempt to get it right. The truth has two sides and both deserve a voice in order to be understood. While they often clash, that doesn’t make one side right or wrong. Contradictions must coexist in order to see the story in its entirety.
Weeks after we’d parted ways, my housemate sent me this message: You provided some of the best and worst times of my college career and I don’t know what to do about it anymore. That was the last thing he said to me before I deleted his number.
The following summer, I mainly kept to myself. I checked the garden and listened to the songbirds. The walls shivered with distant thunder, a pleasant sound. The stormy breeze carried my favorite scent of clean laundry across neighboring yards. For the first time in months, I was finally at peace—to a degree.
I thought that distance would cure me, but it only complicated my inner conflict. Spending time with true friends reminded me of what love was supposed to feel like: lifting each other up, offering a listening ear, and being a shoulder to lean on. Despite the evident support and compassion, the absence of chaos churned within me.
None of these healthy friendships carried the same thrill of my toxic one. I never felt such delirious adrenaline as I did with my housemate. Long after we’d cut off contact, I often woke up sweating from vivid dreams that urged me to reach out and “fix things.” This fear reaction was blissfully familiar. If I knew such a bond was harmful and impractical, why did it feel so right?
Craving those euphoric days of reciprocal kindness felt like chasing a high with no reward. To a degree, it was an addiction. My therapist recently taught me about oxytocin—the “love hormone.” This chemical most notably stimulates prosocial behaviors and strong sensations of warmth and intimacy when with a loved one. Triggered by positive engagement, oxytocin joins dopamine and serotonin to send blissful feelings through our nervous system. The more we interact with others that make us feel good, the more oxytocin is released, leaving us hungry for more.
What my therapist taught me next is a contradiction in itself: while oxytocin is commonly known as the “love hormone,” the chemical may also trigger anxiety in the threat of social tension, deeming it the “crisis chemical.”
Because the same hormone is associated with both comfort and crisis, anxiety commonly is mistaken for love in a toxic relationship. When our brain senses a social threat, it sends warning signals that we might perceive as intense attraction. The alarm bells ring away but we dismiss them as butterflies in our stomachs. Thus, the cycle of forgiving, forgetting, and getting our feelings hurt again continues.
In other words, oxytocin is its own oxymoron: a hormone with sweet-and-sour consequences.
Even with my newfound reasoning backed by science, I was still at war with myself. While my friend refused to take accountability for his actions, that didn’t mean I deserved harm. However, I couldn’t place all of the blame on him, either. From his perspective, his decision to cut me off was for his own mental health. If both sides of the story were valid, how would I ever find a source of closure?
Step one of this uncomfortable equation identified conflicting variables. Step two examined what each variable meant on its own, distinctly different from one another but equally justifiable. Perhaps the answer to the equation wasn’t really a solution at all. What brought me peace of mind didn’t make logical sense, but maybe it was never supposed to.
What if we saw all humans as morally gray? Figuring out why my friend mistreated me wasn’t as easy as deciding that “he was a bad person.” Similarly, I couldn’t dismiss my own reactionary episodes because “I was a good person.” There isn’t such a thing as good and bad people. We’re all just people—capable of doing both wonderful and terrible things.
Embracing both sides of an oxymoron is what gives it its strength. Once I stopped judging myself and others based on one variable, I started to see us all the way we were intended to be: multi-dimensional.
I am both worthy of love and guilty of pain. I may never stop hurting even while I’m healing. I am allowed to love hard and refuse unjustified forgiveness. I may always miss people that I’ll likely never see again.
This complexity humbles me. Like the oxymoron, uniting differences that clash generates a new definition of its own. Approaching this story from all angles is the closest thing I will get to closure, and I am learning to be okay with that.
I will remember our friendship as bittersweet—a beautiful, miserable medley of contradictions.
Bethany Cutkomp (she/her) is a writer from St. Louis, Missouri. One day, she hopes to publish YA fiction and befriend the opossums under her porch. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Worm Moon Archive, Moot Point Magazine, tiny wren lit, ballast, Pigeon Review, and Split Rock Review.
Visit Bethany’s website