I sit on my bed, listening as my friend continues to talk about how upset she was that her friend was going out when they were supposed to be quarantined due to their close contact. “Imagine not caring that we are in the middle of a pandemic, why won’t they just stay inside?” 

I sit on my bed three weeks later, listening to my same friend talk about how she hung out with her friends yesterday. I look at her through my phone and say, “I thought you were supposed to be quarantined?” A moment of silence fills the speakers, “Well it was only a close contact, I don’t really care.” I stare confused, and I begin to get annoyed. Not care? How can she just not care? What a hypocrite. 

Hypocrite. Hypocrite. Hypocrite. Why am I getting so angry about this? Why am I so annoyed? It’s my own personal nails on a chalkboard. I want to tell her that she is selfish and doesn't care that she could have an infectious virus, but I refrain. I look at her and say, “You should really stay inside.” She scoffs at me, “There is nothing to worry about, people do it all the time and they are okay. 

My blood continues to boil. At this point, it is not even the fact that she went out that makes me the most upset. It is the fact that she is being a hypocrite and yelled at her friend three weeks prior. I tell her “I have to go.”

I hate hypocrites. Why can I not stop being so angry about this? Even hours after our conversation my blood still boiled. I was burning in rage and annoyance. She was being so selfish in my eyes. She did the one thing that she shouldn’t have done. She had one job and couldn’t even follow it. 

I didn’t stop thinking about it until she called me ten days later, “I have Covid, I don’t even know how I got it, I was so safe.” Control your anger, control yourself. I look at her through the phone screen, and tell her to “feel better soon, and stay inside.” She almost looks embarrassed when I say that to her. Does she know that I was right all along? A wave of satisfaction fills my body.

With each week I find more things that she has been hypocritical about. She seems to always find something new. Her hypocritical words ring through my ears, this is the worst pet peeve. I am going to burst. My head is screaming at me to yell at her, call her out, but my mouth is too afraid to speak, so I yell silently.

I have to distance myself from her or I will explode. Does she have ANY integrity?  Eventually, I began calling her out for little things, she ignored me at first, but as I pushed she began to realize what she was doing. She had stopped calling people out regularly. 

I sit on my bed and smile. I think I did it. I can never completely stop her from being a hypocrite, I realize I do it too, and I get angry at myself each time. Wow, I hate pet peeves.