Combustion

nebula: two

I had been banking a lot of my potential acceptance in where I sat in the cafeteria. Following the trend of the first day, and maybe just my life in general: I flubbed up.

I was sort of late getting to the cafeteria, and by the time the moment had come to choose the all important lunchroom seat and mark my place in high school society- most seats had already been taken. But the more important issue was that I couldn't even find a single person I knew. I suppose this shouldn't have been all that surprising to me considering that I'd only been in the school for a couple of hours and had only talked to about ten people, a third of them being teachers.

Somehow, I managed to find a relatively empty table near the edge of the cafeteria. There were a couple other students, but they didn't bother to talk to each other, much less talk to me. I only felt vaguely unwelcome.

I ate my lunch without speaking to anyone, but even though I was silent, my thoughts were panicked enough for me to completely block out all the chatter around me. 

The strange thing about being new is that I didn't feel invisible, even though I was. The school was large enough that nobody would have noticed I'd never been there before. The upperclassmen would have written me off as any other annoying freshman, and the freshmen didn't think it uncommon to stumble upon a new face. Still, I felt terribly exposed in the corner of the cafeteria, like I even had the luxury of being gossiped about. 

I think I would rather be gossiped about, if I'm being perfectly honest with you. That way your existence is at least being acknowledged, and you can trick yourself into thinking that you have any significance in society. At the time I guess wouldn't have minded being famous in a terrible way.  

I never believed you would have understood the feeling of outsiderness because your niche was so well-developed. I just looked at you and got the impression that you were both the stallion and the chariot rider: someone so wild and in control. You knew what you wanted, and you would get it. And if you didn't know what you wanted, you'd find out. Somehow you made contradictions make sense.

As you now know, being an outsider is something beyond loneliness. It's a mixture of anxiety and confusion and a lot of indescribable feelings that are so intense they often don't make sense. It's realizing everything belongs except you, and you're struggling against glass confines that should be easy to break. The thing with glass though, is that it's something so fragile and delicate. You can't break glass without feeling a little bit guilty for its destruction. You can't break glass and hope for it to return back to pristine condition. You can't break glass without feeling more endangered by the shrapnel underfoot.

It was really weird sitting there the first day at lunch, because I was physically a part of it, but I felt far away- like an observer in a far off satellite, hovering somewhere in translucent nonexistence. It felt like a held breath. I couldn't tell if I was the one in the glass enclosure or if everyone else was. I just had this nagging feeling that the glass had to be broken. The rewards far outweighed the risks.

From this new and peculiar vantage point, I was finally able to pinpoint faces that I had spoken to. Most importantly, I was able to see you and Aaron and a slew of people that I didn't know at a table with one empty seat.

I had finished my lunch. It's rather easy to eat your fill in ten minutes or less when your eating isn't interrupted by talking. Unfortunately for me, this meant that I had a lot of time left to kill before next class started, and I wasn't sure how to spend this unforeseen free time. Lunch was barely half way over, and suddenly I was very tired and nervously excited.

I realized I had three options: to walk more laps around the school, continue sitting at the table in uncomfortable silence, or to claim that spot at the table as my own.