Dear Journal,
09/08/01 10:11 PM
Hey I am alone in my house. Max said he's going to call me. I'd say the chances of him actually doing so…are slim…if not quixotic. But that's ok with me. I am alright sitting here alone listening to the music that drains in and out of my ears. Sweet isn't it----the melody that moves through my fingers, and tickles my lips as it calls me to the fifth dimension. Life can be so sweet and yet I wonder why I make it painful. Being here…I can't help but wonder where my fingers will take me on this excursion of the mind and they roll over the letters making mistakes errors everything and I don't care. It suits me just fine. I am scared about going to school on Monday. My first two days were fine. I just wish…that there weren't parts that felt so awful…like the part where I was sitting at the table with those two sophomores in the senior cafeteria and that kid was faltering sitting there, silent and out of place. Silently giggling to himself in the moments of awkwardness. It hurt me to watch him, because in him, I saw a reflection of someone very familiar.
In Middle School, I was the one who sat by herself in the cafeteria…it was so low and awkward sitting alone…the teachers walked by and I swear they felt sorry for me. Sometimes I would find enough courage to walk over to the table that was jam packed with girls and ask if I could sit down. They were polite of course, so they wouldn't refuse me, but it was like I wasn't there at all. They talked right through me, as if my presence was nonexistent. When I would return to our class, walk into the coat room. The guys would berate me… It wasn't the words that hurt me, it was the cookies I gave to Greg on Pollyanna that sat there till April…It was the mortifying feeling that was left in me when I knew that we had to choose partners and I ambled around the room, until everyone was coupled but me…it was how they cringed when the teacher assigned me into their group. The boys…I didn't even talk to some of them before they decided that they hated me.
So when I saw him there, so alone in that crowded cafeteria I saw a little pieces of myself: these facets of me are in the past and so easily, are they forgotten. My words would tremble, and stutter out of my mouth as a manifestation of my weakness of my feelings of inferiority. Then the other day I saw a face from my past and with the single glace of recognition it all came back. All of the pieces of myself that have long since been banished rush over my mentality. I feel the need to explain how I've changed. Yet in that sole desire to prove myself, I am demonstrating the empty spaces within me. That is, if I had truly accepted that who I was, is a distance part of who I am, then would I really feel the need to prove myself to them.
At a new school I feel the pressure to re-establish myself to at least the level of social comfort I had at my former school. It's not important for me to be popular in my new school. It's important for me to be happy, and to have good friends, who will understand me, and appreciate my eccentricities. One of the best feelings in the world is the comfort level that comes with good friends. You don't feel like you have to censor or adjust who you are, or what you truly think. It's knowing that you'll disagree and argue on things, but it won't tear you apart....If there is one thing that I yearn for it's to have a good friend at my new school.
Love,
Bonnie