Girl (long story!)

Now, there is Girl. Too big, too fat, too loud, too shy, and too stupid in too many aspects of her life. Inspired by too many people to do too many things with her life. Life full of jokes that are only funny to her and songs that mean too much for her own good. Girl was out of place, and no body cared.1

Girl grew up almost happy. Good education, good family, good town. She was quiet most of the time, but once you hit a nerve of any kind, she was off. She knew what she liked and what she didn’t, and that was it. Girl also had friends. These friends she knew the names of, and names only. They laughed, they played, they went over each other’s houses, and then they went away. Whether it was to a new school or to a new planet, Girl did not know, since she barely knew who they were.2

Girl began to grow up. The apple printed dresses and sunflower leggings of her youth gave way to skorts and oversized hair clips. She made new friends who she knew better, and they seemed invincible, basking in the days when homework was to color in the doggy. Girl and her friends had their first crush (be it all on he same person) and they played dress up and listened to the boy bands of the age. Yet Girl knew she was different. She cried under pressure and starved attention. She was territorial over friends and hated friends of friends. They were hers, and that was final. 3

Girl entered a new stage in life. Her old friends in different classes now scorned her, taken by others who knew more of the outside world. She made new friends, those she did not like, but were a mild balm against her past. A band-aid that kept falling off, but still on the wound for comfort. She tolerated them, and slowly grew to like them, if only a little. Yet Girl had no real social standing. There was the odd birthday party she was invited to, but that was rare. More often than not Girl was left out of pool parties and Halloween get-togethers. Girl’s parents begged her to make more friends, but she was afraid of the telephone and refused. She cried at night for companionship, and not for the last time.4

Girl grew up even more, old friends becoming strangers and older friends becoming enemies. So far removed was she from the real world that she felt uncomfortable away from the hole in which she had lived. Then, one day, her prayers were answered. A friend. It began over a news article they were asked to answer questions about, and then they sat together at snack time. Girl had become weird over the past few years and her new friends fit the bill. That year was a shining moment for Girl, for she found the thrill of theater and became more comfortable in her own skin, however small it was.5

Girl entered the next stage in her life. The strangers who once were friends she barely saw and she hated her enemies with a passion. She made friends with the friends of her friends, and slowly grew out of the last stages of pop music (and she never looked back into that bubbly world again). Girl tried to fit in, but with the academic schedule containing ancient history, Girl continued to alienate herself even more. She had developed a passion for Egypt before the age of 9, and now at the age of 11 she was bringing her fold-out mummy book in to class. This was the time where Girl found out that she actually enjoyed being a teacher’s pet, even if her teachers didn’t know that hey had a strange girl under their arm.6

By the time she was 12, Girl had already decided what she wanted when she grew up, and had grown a strong distaste for math of any kind (a bitterness that grew even more once she started algebra). Girl found herself interested with other cultures and also found her fetish for purses and handbags (but never pocketbooks, as they are for old ladies). Girl had made more new friends the previous year and now began to spend more time with them. They were more insane than her, and with gentle prodding (and a few sessions of laughing at her), her new friends squeezed Girl out of her shell. She became weirder, kissing up to teachers even more and listening to Chinese instrumental music. She now had been playing the flute for 3 years, and had been in 4 different plays. Despite the month where her computer was taken away for the C- she received on her report card, Girl wished she could go back to that year and re-live the last 3 months of 7th grade. 7

Girl was quite the world traveler, having been to the Caribbean, London, and Scotland, she wished she could travel more. But even more than the wish to travel, there was another ache, an ache for a different kind of companionship. That summer, Girl told herself that the next year would be the year she would get a boyfriend. 8

That year was a hard year for Girl. Harder math problems, stranger teachers, and even more friends of friends, who she now was becoming accustomed to. That was the year she discovered music. It started out as the song that everyone else seemed to know, and she didn’t. Then she learned all about the band so that she was not alienated from her friends. Then it lead to a different band, one that was younger and had a different air about them. She found a passion for school dances, ones that were so loud that she could scream and no one would hear her, and she would emerge at the end of the evening practically blind, deaf, and mute. Then the dances seemed to stop.9

The dances stopped not because of bad behavior of the students or the town home moms rebelling (which are both possible reasons). No, the dances stopped because the DJ was booked, plain and simple. But something so simple threw Girl into a 3 month state of depression. She listened to her favorite songs over and over until she cried and screamed the posters of the bands she was now listening to. She didn’t talk to her parents and wished for love every moment of ever day while her friends had no idea. So Girl wrote.10

She wrote poems of lost love she never had, of the things her friends did, of the hate for her enemies who once were her friends. She wrote, and she received praise for her scribblings thanks to a website that allowed people to comment on poetry written by others. Girl loved it, until the concert. 11

Girl had been talking to her friends about going to a concert that was going to be nearby. She prayed and cried in front her computer screen while the “Buy Tickets” button sat not 2 inches away from her nose. After a month of this and another bad grade in math, Girl broke. She sat down with her parents to talk about the grade, and then spilled into the raw emotion of the past months. Needless to say, her parents were shocked. They had no idea that while they cleaned up the dinner dishes in the kitchen, Girl was sobbing her eyes out while writing a poem in her room. They tried to buy tickets for the concert, but were too late. It sold out that very night.12

8th grade went by, Girl graduating in a white dress that made her feel connected to the very band she had wanted to see live. She listened to more music and found it hard to live away from the internet. Girl’s laptop not only held old school reports, emails, and pictures of family vacations. It also held music. A gateway that was painful to pass through, and even more painful to live in. A triangle soon formed in her bedroom between the computer screen, her heart, and the bed that she cried on soon after listening to her favorite music. She was in love, and she found a new way of life.13

The day of the concert came and went, with Girl not an hour’s drive away. She read everything she could about it and imagined that she was there. She began to listen to different music. Emo, she began to describe herself as. Not the stereotyped cutter emo that everyone thought of, but the girl crying while she listened to her favorite song. She idolized the musicians, loving everything about them. She read books about them, and about how people reacted to music. It was like a new life, and she was in love with it.14

Her friends, however, were not so tolerant. They fed off of her new feelings, ones she had harbored for so long and were now being let out. They laughed when she was upset, and IM conversations and poems became more violent. She saw them as relentless, laughing at one of her own while she stood helpless. It was like a young animal watching its mother being killed. Her parents were of no help either. They had no idea of this transformation, and if they passed someone dressed in all black with a tattoo, comments were soon to follow. Girl regarded all people who shopped a Hot Topic and wore black Converse as her kin, something she confided only in her cousin, with whom she had been emailing for the past two years. She wanted desperately to be like them, but the scorn of her family scared her half into killing herself.15

She tried to ease her family into it, first buying a backpack at Spencer’s, but that proved too much for her mother, so now Girl roamed the mall alone while her mother and sister shopped in another store. She talked more of music and soon it was all she talked about. She bought band merchandise and changed her computer wallpaper from her friends and family to bands. Yet everything she did was met with blank stares and raised eyebrows. Girl found it easier just to withdraw altogether. She kept silent instead of letting herself talk about a new CD around her sister, and didn’t even mention her desire to play bass guitar and dye her hair to her parents. Now she just sits and wonders what it would be like to live life on her own, with a boyfriend, and to live with any belief she wanted.16

There were happy days, however few. She saw herself as a whole one day, not just a clump of hair or a small pimple. For the first time in a while, she stood in front of a mirror and loved what she saw. The feeling stayed with her the whole day, and part of the next, and she decided to try and make that feeling last as long as it could. Whether it would last for a year or a day, Girl did not know. She even thought that it was maybe a strange connection between her and the one who loved her, the one person who she was trying to reach. “Maybe, just maybe”, Girl thought, “ I love myself because the one who I am supposed to love is thinking of me at this very moment”. Girl’s stupid head was full of thoughts like these, and thoughts of this sort always seemed to haunt her at night. 17

---to be continued---