Halt! Who Goes There?

Welcome to another week of IndieInk.org Writer's Challenge II. The folks at IndieInk.org are always welcome to new people joining the fun. You can sign up to do it just once, or you can keep coming back week after week - no pressure, no huge commitment. If you feel like giving it a whirl, click the link here. Pairings are randomly generated, but you never know, you just might be responsible for giving me my next prompt!

This week my prompt comes from Xander, who writes here. The prompt is, "The quadratic formula: friend or foe?"

**********************************

*heavy sigh*

If I, in my very limited scope of knowledge, understand anything about the quadratic formula, it is that it's about balance. I could be all wrong, and if I am... la dee freekin' dah. Sure, I'm a math head. Sure, I came out of Algebra I with an A+, but that was back when I was a sophomore in high school. Which means, that was a very long time ago. Dirt was still relatively new. Dinosaurs still roamed the earth. Mankind had only recently learned to walk upright. So I'm just not going to worry about it a whole lot right now, m'kay?

Friend or foe, now that I can do. Oy vey, can I.

Here we go...

She whispers in my ear, pushing back a stray strand of hair with the gentle touch of a lover's fingers. She likes subtlety when it comes to praise. She knows I'll be embarrassed if she brags about me within earshot of anyone else. She says she likes me; she likes who I am; she likes my work; she likes the way I am and the quirkiness of the stuff that makes me laugh. She thinks my eyes are pretty. She takes me by the wrist and leads me, showing me beauty in the mundane. She delights in my wide-eyed wonder at things that most people take for granted. She paints bright color across my world. She loves; she's never petty; she embraces everything life has to offer and sends it all back out gift wrapped. Gift wrapped and tied in a shiny ribbon. She wants me to have everything I want, everything I've ever dreamed of - she always tells me that it's all right there at  my fingertips. She's my best friend.

The other one whispers too - the sound is like the incessant drone of a wasp hive, that noise that makes me feel like I need to swallow twice just to keep everything down. That seems ridiculous, because she's all about shoving it down, and she is brutally unkind about it. She's always negative. She likes to stick out her figurative foot and then laugh when I've tripped and skinned my knee. She's not evil, not really, she just doesn't see why I should be deserving of so much good. Maybe she doesn't see why I deserve any good at all. She likes to ridicule; she likes to tell me I'm fat and worthless; she likes to tell me I have nothing worthwhile to say. She tells me that nobody cares. She'd be happy if my world was gray, gray cinder block, gray benches, gray imagination. She tells me to just give up. She's my worst enemy.

Alluring, encouraging gypsy or repugnant, pessimistic hag. Friend or foe.

I'm either my own best friend, or my own worst enemy.

This is my dichotomy.