Today was just like any other day. I was awoken by Joseph, my dad, followed by the sluggish morning routine that goes un-charmed by the free birds’ happy melodies, and then school. There I tried with motivation to concentrate on what was being taught, I also attempted to not end up hating them (you should never hate someone) at the end of the day.
Every day they repeatedly taunt me, those with jock boyfriends, the best clothes, impressive houses, and no indivuality. Those who follow the herd, and apparently the herd has been obsessed with making my life miserable for around a year.
I was walking down the hall today, just as every day I heard the snickering, saw their fingers aimed at me, felt the opinions and words they suggest to the world sting my heart and flow through me like a lethal venom. I sensed my anger emerging, felt it begin to slash through the barriers like it so often does. I felt the tears start to bleed into my eyes, not through sadness, but shear anger. And like everyday, I tried to soothe myself with makeshift thoughts of encouragement. The same thoughts that never seem to quench my un-mistakable need for comfort. All there was to do was wait for the rush of relief that last bell would bring to me, freeing me from my un-avoidable peneticerie for a few more hours.
When the school day is through all I ever feel like considering doing is to blow off my homework (c’mon, I already had six hours of school), lay on my bed, listen to music and stay locked in my thoughts and that world they bring me to for as long as I’m forced to have a life on this earth. It seems that I’m always half way there when I’m violently pulled back to reality by a grasping hand. It’s comparable to an inconsiderate grip un-knowingly breaking the momentary, artificial peace and almost numb feeling that I yern for every second that it’s not mine.
Today that hand belonged to my mother, who suddenly had the urge to take me to the mall for “human interaction”; she and I both know she just wanted to get away from Joseph, his stubbornness, and the constant in-tolerant screaming it brings to us. Believe me, at the end of a miserable day hearing those two go at it easily drives me half way to insanity on a one way street. Keeping this in mind, I still would have chosen to stay home, hadn’t my mother been so insistent.
Well the mall was… less than fun. I impatiently filled the time by slipping into the nearest store whenever I saw my almost pathetically shallow tormenters walk by. A few times I had my mother sit outside of the confines of the bathroom so I wouldn’t have to face the world with a strike of stinging relent.
A morsel of comfort was found in leaning against a stall’s wall with my eyes closed and willingly allowing my thoughts to divert into flashes of sleepovers with one time friends, inside jokes, and flirtatious smiles from now avoided love interests. The memories re-incarnated a now rare emotion that made me feel care-free for a moment. A twitch that resulted of an attempted smile motivated by the cheerful thoughts swiftly and crudely transformed into bitter-sweet, rapidly flowing tears that leaked from the vast gap of remorse and self- pity I dug when I knew there wouldn’t be any more of these occasions for me. The hole lead straight to my eyes to feed them the tears. The clear and deceivingly innocent looking drops had no intent of stopping. They came down so viciously that my entire face felt damp, my sobs left few and small intervals in which I could greedily suck in air, only resulting in a cough. I had cried for the second time that day, not to my surprise.
When we were home I made a bee- line to my bedroom again and started a new train of thought to seek what the source of the tears really was, what gave me the shovel to dig the hole leading to my stinging eyes. What was it, I wondered, that made those immature “classmates” of mine treat me the way they do? I’ve ruled out my looks, before the degrading teasing began, I had been acclaimed by many friends and boys as beautiful. I’m not seen as stupid, desperate students come to me for help. Was it the way I acted, the way I dressed, just because I don’t wear the rugby shirts and sports pants that I personally found ugly and un-original? Why should these things matter? Was I impolite, selfish? There really seemed to be no reason for what they did, what it made me feel. I couldn’t see any real reason except for not wanting to wear what they do, but that doesn’t matter.
The only differences between them and I was the clothes and possibly that I’ve never been into sports. I’m not your classic American teenager, although no one seemed to care or notice before. I’ve just never felt that I should contort myself into a mold. I’d rather be myself than another interchangeable, “perfect” person, the image, reputation, or label that they all worked for, obsessed over. I don’t see why I should be set apart for this. But I’ve seen it done to others, so this was the only possible answer; it was simply because I’m not exactly like them. It’s all because I am “different”.
You’d think that the world would be able to handle such minor things that really shouldn’t affect anyone at all, wouldn’t you? But because of the word and image of “perfection”, because of people’s ignorance and fear of what is different, people like I are forced to suffer for committing un-spoken, non-existent crimes. We suffer from discrimination, we suffer from loneliness and we suffer from the way the world makes us doubt our self worth.
Tonight was not first night that these intolerable ideas have raced through my mind, only to hide in the depths of my thoughts and be ignored until some shallow offender show’s me the reality again. There has been more than one occasion when I have taken a remorseful blade and brought it to my disconnected body in despair for the loose of what the world could be, the lose of people that people isolate like myself.
But it is these thoughts that show me what they strive for, perfection and an un-realistic shiny little world of flawlessness. They haven’t come to realize that they are the flaw. By not looking further than the clothes, not penetrating under the skin, they lost some of their finest people. They are their own destruction. I am the child that is born of the wallowing pit of damage that they have come to cause, and because of this I know more than just skin tones and labels. I know of what people are inside and what they could be to the world if only the world would give them a chance.