Nicotine Addiction and Other Such Things

teenagers (short story)

In the fall of my junior year in high school, I decided to become detached. Detached from everyone and everything in this world. I had no idea what good it was going to do except that it would probably save me from heartache.

It's not as though I had experienced great tragedy in my life by then but just the possibility of it was scary.

I've always had this tendency to get overly emotional about the smallest of things and I'd always put meaning to things that really didn't mean much. I thought of doing this as a little bit of an experiment.

So I began my journey to social exclusion.

It wasn't going to be hard on the familial front because I'm not much of a talker in front of those guys. Most of the attention always went to my two sisters and I just kind of blended in the crowd there.

They thought I was the quiet reader and I was fine with it.

The part where I was going to hide, socially, in school became a bit of a task but it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.

It wasn't as if I had a tonne of friends before my little experiment began but now I really didn't have any.

At first, my genuine friends couldn't understand what I was doing and why I was doing it. Maybe it was because I didn't care enough to tell them and they didn't care enough to actually get it out of me. So we came to an impasse. And, it was fine with me. I started ignoring my friends and then I sadly realised that I wasn't the ignorer, I was the one being ignored. I had really thought that it would make me sad and angry or at least something but much to my surprise and I think, their dismay, I couldn't bring myself to care.

Everyday at lunch, I would sit under a tree in the makeshift little park in my school and watch people.

Now, I realise that this sounds extremely creepy but I wasn't planning on stalking those people. I just sat and watched.

I would watch the little kids playing around without a care in the world.

I would watch high school sweethearts, being just that.

And I would concoct stories in my head related to those people.

This is who they were five years back and this is who they will be five years from now.

Writing stories is the only thing I have ever been remotely good at and so that is what I would do.

It was the middle of September and my experiment was well underway.

I was trying to find the perfect character for my new story and that's when I saw Aisha.

Aisha and I had a few classes together but somehow we'd never had a conversation.

She was sitting under the shade of a small tree opposite to the one I was sitting under.

Aisha wasn't your conventionally pretty girl. She had small eyes like slits and she wore big bulky glasses. Her curly hair was always tied in a messy bun.

But there was something about her, which drew a person in and that's why she always had a group of people around her.

She was one of the well known kids in our grade. While not popular, she had a shitload of friends and she was never alone.

I was a little surprised to see her sitting all alone. Our term exams had just gotten over and everyone was celebrating.

Except for, well, me and as it turned out, Aisha.