When I was seven years old, I thought I was sick.
There was no other excuse for why Christina and Marina gave me odd looks on the playground.
Or why Jake and Blake moved their desks ten spaces away from mine in the classroom. I knew it was ten, because I counted.
I had went home and took medicine, washed all my clothes, stole some of my mothers makeup to cover up the red spots that had to be on my face, but I couldn't see, but had to be there because why else would people be staring at me as if I was nothing but dirt?
Maybe if I cleaned myself up, I could swing on the monkey bars, too.
Obliviousness.
Every child carries some, it’s what makes them so innocent. I had so much I carried it around in a giant pink and purple bag larger than I was tall in the fourth grade.
My classmates, my peers, my friends, they all had cute faces, cute clothes, allowed to shop at the stores in the mall I couldn’t even pronounce the names of.
They sat in circles and brushed and braided each other's hair while I sat in the corner with knots. I was always told I was too mature to fit in the popular crowd, but as much of a compliment as that was, I still wished that I was an idiot, with innocence.
Maybe then I’d have braided hair, too.
I forced myself into lunchroom tables in my first year of middle school.
I had weird interests, weird nicknames, a weird, loud voice that made others cover their ears, thighs and chest and stomach too big to be those of a fifth grader, oh I just stood out sitting.
And with all the weird nicknames, the people I had called my friends, called me nothing.
I was nothing.
Nothing but oblivious until I took my glasses off to wipe them against my shirt one day, and it was like I wiped off the very metaphorical sheet that was blinding me.
Seven girls, eight if you count me, squeezed at a lunch table, eight, seven of the girls whispering in each others ears, eight girls, one the odd one out and not one of the other seven cared to even look my way.
Seven ten year old girls training to be heartbreakers, and the first heart they had learned to break, was mine.
Maybe if I learned to whisper, I could sit there too.
Left with one and then none, I ended seventh grade with myself, all by myself, no person even alive that I could pretend to call my friend.
Summertime sadness, summertime somnolence, staying up until sunrise just to chug a drink meant for working adults but I felt like I was working because why else was I so exhausted?
Ignore, ignore, ignore, if the pretty girls can ignore, I could ignore. Ignore my mom, ignore my brother, ignore my family that traveled across the border, ignore the sunrise that peeked passed my window panes each morning, ignore the way the birds sang and the morning glories bloomed with each intention of their names.
Ignore the beauty in things you used to bask in.
Beauty was indifference.
Maybe if I was indifferent, then I would be accepted, too.
On my thirteenth birthday, my biggest gift was a loss of innocence.
Along with that came a skeleton of a girl standing in the bathroom with a shadow of blood on the floor and the ghostly remains of this mornings breakfast served in the toilet.
Foods weren’t fuel they were numbers, counting by one hundred, two hundred, never more than three or else I’d look like the girl who got picked out of society like vegetables off a toddler's plate.
Those vegetables were all I was eating those days, if I even ate at all.
I didn’t care to eat because all I had been been craving was the sweetness of acceptance.
Each time I picked at the vegetables, the string beans, the squash, the two hundred and fifty calories meant to keep my heart beating, I’d overthink.
I’d overthink about the girls in lunch who’d bring a salad and a bottle of water.
They’d have skinny legs and tiny arms so thin and fragile oh I could just snap them.
Salads, they were meant for pretty girls, picky girls, Abercrombie and Fitch wearing girls, “I got my first boyfriend in 6th grade” girls, never have to worry about my weight fast metabolism girls, blonde girls, talls girls, girls who knew how to run girls, girls who knew how to talk without stammering over their every word girls, “Good luck working on the project with her” gossipping girls, girls who made me throw up whether I wanted to or not.
Maybe if I put that all behind and ate another salad, I’d be pretty enough to fit in, too.
- I wrote this six years ago when I was 14.
