Effortless

Seven

One thing I had always hated was crying.

I hated the feeling of knowing that you're about to cry, so you start trying to suppress the tears that you don't want to fall. The clenching of your jaw in hopes that somehow it will push the tears back. The ugly face that you start to make because you're giving it your all to not start bawling but you aren't doing a great job at it. So then you realize that you can't stop it anymore and you just let it happen, making all of the previous actions pointless.

I hated the fact that being a boy and crying over small things was so frowned upon. When girls would cry over small things, a lot of the time people would comfort them. They would tell them that it was going to be okay and that next time they would do better. They would wipe the tears off of their face and smile at them in hopes that it would cheer them up.

I wanted to be able to break down when something did not go my way. Wait, let me rephrase. I wanted other people to be okay with me breaking down when something did not go my way. I was more emotional than I had liked to admit. Honestly, that was part of the reason I had started drinking. It replaced the bad emotions with numbness, and numbness was better than negative emotions.

I wanted it to be accepted for me to be overly upset about the fact that in all four years of high school, I had never won the class presidency. Not freshman year, not sophomore year, not junior year, and now not senior year. And who was the reason for that every single fucking year?

Javier. It was always Javier.

So when I involuntarily started crying in the bleachers of the gym, instead of staying there and letting my classmates watch me bawl like a big ass baby, I left. I didn't cause a scene like I had initially thought I would. I simply stood up, pushed past the teachers trying to stop me from leaving, and left.

I knew that the whole class was staring as I left, but I didn't care at that point. I also knew that I was going to be in a huge amount of trouble for leaving campus unauthorized, but I did not care about that either. All I wanted was to be out of the gym because staying there would have been worse.

I wanted to feel numb. I wanted the tears and embarrassment to end. My mind immediately went to my coping mechanism. I started to think about how much I wanted- no, needed a drink right then. I surely had something at home but my aunt did not have work that day so she would be at home. I wasn't ready nor in the mood for her lecture.

Music would have helped calm me down, it wouldn't have been more help than a drink but it would have helped. However, I had left my earbuds at home like the idiot I was, so that was not an option.

So, I decided to drown in my own emotions at the park about five minutes from our school.

The park was empty. That made sense since it was the middle of the day on a weekday. I was sitting on the swing, kicking my legs back and forth but not hard enough to move the swing much. I wasn't crying as hard as before. I had calmed down to mostly sniffing and a few tears falling here and there.

"Fucking pathetic." I mumbled to myself as I drew in the sand with my foot.

That was exactly how I felt, pathetic. I, an almost seventeen year old guy, was crying in the middle of a park because I lost. I wasn't liked enough by my classmates to be elected as senior class president. Maybe it was my fault. I always had an attitude with people and never made much of an effort to change that. People just pissed me off too easily. Though, I wasn't rude to everyone. There were people who liked me, just not enough of them.

I guess I thought that since I was the little brother of a well liked football player and cheerleader that that would make a difference. Though, I don't know why I thought that because that had never worked for me before.