I started dating an anarchist, antiracist, antifascist, pro-Palestinian, anti-nuclear girl in highschool.
Completely degenerate. She did drugs, drunk a lot, smoked, self harmed. Barely came to school. Probably some of kind of eating disorder as well. But my God she was cute, and such a nice girl when not talking about politics. It was fucking tragic to see her destroy herself like that.
I started talking to her because I was class representative and had to bring her homeworks and lessons to her.
After weeks of just doing vague small talk at her door, she invited me in. Tiny apartment, single mother, a cat. But her room was almost very girly, and very clean compared to the rest of her house.
We talked about a ton of stuff other than politics. We had quite a few similar interests: cooking, we were both weebs, both wanted to travel a lot, both read a lot, some similar music tastes.
Did that for a few months. Realised that what she really wanted was mostly to belong to something. She wasn't really into politics all that much, she was just drawn into it by ""friends"". A bunch of tragic thing had happened to her. Her father left the family when she was a baby, she was raped at 8 by her mother's boyfriend, did a suicide attempt at 12, started falling into a bad crowd at 14, who pretty much pushed most of her degenerate habits on her, as well as their politics. Her mother was rarely home.
I kept listening. Sometimes I would tell a few things that happened to me as well. Sometimes we cooked together. We went out to just walk. I saw her more and more. She came back to school. Mostly stopped talking about politics, slowly stopped hanging out with her "friends". Started getting close to mine, and make new ones. Stopped drugs. Everyone was pretty much assuming we were a couple by then.
Then one day, I hugged her when saying goodbye. I don't know, it came like that. Felt natural to stay like this. She started crying. We must have stayed like for hours.
