Wenke
Wenke was the kind of person who’d tell you exactly what she thought, which is rarer than you’d expect. Red wine helped, and she could talk for hours without needing much back—just someone willing to sit there while she figured things out. She couldn’t sit still in one direction, though. Social to her core, needed people, needed company, needed noise, but then suddenly had to disappear into complete silence like her life depended on it. The contradiction never bothered her because she was too busy living to worry about making sense of herself.
What made her stand out was the refusal to play by any script. Most girls her age were performing something—a version they thought guys wanted, or their friends expected. Wenke just didn’t. She could beat most of the dudes at Pro Evolution Soccer, owned a console and a massive TV without irony, had terrible opinions about punctuality and organization, and gave exactly zero fucks about any of it. She wanted people who were genuinely funny, not trying to be, because humor was how you got past her walls. Charisma was everything. She had no type—looks were relative, she said—but she could tell in a second if someone was real or performing.
Her problem, and she knew it was a problem, was the fear. Not of much, but of that one thing. Love scared her more than anything. She had freedom in her blood and she knew commitment would kill it. So people fell for her and she didn’t fall back, and she felt bad about it sometimes, but not bad enough to change. She was waiting for someone who wouldn’t need her to change, which meant she was probably waiting for no one. It was the kind of contradiction that sounds profound until you realize it’s just how a lot of people feel when they’re young and afraid.
These profiles were everywhere for a while—a certain kind of honesty that only existed in that moment, half advertisement, half confession. People in their early twenties throwing themselves out there with this weird mix of bravado and vulnerability. Wenke’s stuck though, maybe because she wasn’t trying as hard as the others. She just described what she needed, what she feared, what made her laugh, and then she stopped. No performance. No trying to seem cooler or more damaged than she was.
I don’t know what happened to her. The profile’s still in the archive somewhere, frozen in whatever year this was. She wanted endless experience, wanted intensity, wanted to be understood. She also wanted her freedom so badly she was willing to be alone for it. Maybe she got one of those things. Maybe she’s still ordering red wine and talking too much and refusing to show up on time. Maybe she finally met someone who made the two sides of her fit together instead of fighting. Or maybe she just learned to be okay with the contradiction, which would be its own kind of growth, the kind that doesn’t feel like much until much later.