Diary of a Broken Girl

Lunch

Lunch. Lunch is dubbed as the time you get to spend with friends. The one period where you can take a break and become totally relaxed and 100% yourself. All the time you'll hear kids in the halls talk about how lunch is the best part of the day, and how they never want to give it up. It's not quite the same for the loners.

You see them in every lunch period. The ones alone at a table by themselves, alone. But there are loners that you don't see, and they are the loneliest of all. The ones who sit at a table full of people. They look like they're having fun. But they are so lonely surrounded by the people who should be including them in conversation. These are the people who feel loneliest in a crowded hallway.

I am the latter. The one person who looks as if they are having the time of their lives, but are actually dying every moment they spend, sitting at a table where everyone ignores them as if they don't exist. That's common curtesy at my lunch table. Filled with people who claim to be my friends. Ignoring me when I ask a question or have a comment. Or even worse, when no one is saying anything and you think, 'Maybe I can say something and someone will listen', but this doesn't happen. Instead they will talk over you. Reminding you that you don't belong.

One of the most degrading things. Sometimes you can force yourself to believe even if only for a second that you've known some of them more than half your life, they want to talk to you, to hear what you have to say. But you quickly figure out this is not the case. Each day you lose more and more faith in the term friends. What are friends that don't care? But when they're all have what choice do you have?

So there I sit, as they talk amongst theirselves I sit. An Outsider looking in. Looking in on a world I am supposed to belong in. So I hide. Such a cowardly way out I assure you I know. But that's all I've ever known. Hide when things get tough. Parents fighting? Hide. Just hide. I know I'm just hiding from my problems, but it's what I do best. The only thing I can claim to be good at.

So once again here I sit. This time in a library filled with kids I've known for years. This time alone, but inexplicably happy. As if I can do something useful with my time, something precious. I don't have to think about what I'm doing, saying, thinking wrong, I can be with myself. Sometimes that's harder than anything else.

But still I cannot escape. Everyone is paired off even here in the place that should be my sanctuary. Laughing, having fun, being teenagers with time to kill, and youth to live. Here I sit, in a scene so devoid of colour that I see everything in grey and black. There are no colours in a world in which you are always alone, even in a room full of people. When will it stop? When will it get better?