Seeking Smiles//Slow Updates

eleven

Halloween is nearing, my favorite holiday of all time. I love the smell of sugar that travels throughout the neighborhoods; I like walking by houses to glance in their windows and see families and friends watching football passionately on the couch, jumping up with ever score or loss. I like seeing the pumpkins that sit with candles inside them on various doorsteps. It doesn't matter how poorly or expertly they are carved, it is just the assurance that they are there to celebrate a time of fun. The spooky decorations with motion-sensors that jump at anyone who passes by are always a fun rush of adrenaline. Leaping spiders and screaming ghouls in every yard. Trick-or-Treating where kids dress up and go to random houses to fill pillow cases with loads of sweets from chocolate to hard sour drops.

But it's just the first of October. I also want to celebrate, to go and take all my siblings out into the neighborhood and let them gather all the sweets they can. So much that they get a stomach ache from all the sugar they've consumed. But I can't because we don't have costumes and I have the feeling that's a required thing to have to participate in Trick-or-Treating and I'm too afraid of being caught by my father and having him punish not only me, but Maggie, Cecelia, and Malaki.

I used to go, but it has been seven years. Mom would take Malaki, Cecelia, and I even when the bad years approached. We were dressed in various things from little gnomes to superheroes. I still remember, even though it has been so long, that the best thing I'd ever get in my pillowcase would be the little baggies of Haribo gummy bears. Those were the best. The green ones were my favorite, but I loved them all. I miss them, I wish I could buy a giant bag of bears and share them with the household.

I miss everything from when I was young. And sometimes I wish it could just go back to the years where everything was fine and my parents got along and my father loved all of us. But maybe he never really did love any of us and he was just pretending, or he could hide it better then.

I don't know, my anxiety is riding up on me again; the doubt that nothing was true in my childhood and that everything was just made up. I know it was real though, there is living proof. I wish my mind could just accept that and leave me alone.

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I've been ignoring Tyler for a full week now; avoiding him in every possible way. Every time he'd come up and try to make conversation, I'd shut him out with either insulting him or ignoring him completely until he gave up and walked away for the hour. If he sat beside me in class, I'd simply move to another seat and shove my earphones into my ears, turning up the volume nearly all the way until it started to hurt.

Yet every single day, he still came to me and tried to create a conversation with me, but I was never going to say anything useful to him.

I'd rather just be the awful kid in school who didn't care about anybody and nobody cared about him. The one who ignored all others as if all that matters is him and his own world. And that is me. I don't care about anybody and no one cares about me and I do ignore everyone because no one else's life should matter to me. Why should I interfere with them? I don't want them in my own life, so I doubt they want different than me.

I don't even care about failing or passing drama class. It doesn't matter to me anymore. I won't get into a college anyways because my father would never pay for something less or more than what he thinks will benefit himself in the best way. So there really isn't hope in that area. That's why my project with Tyler doesn't matter in the slightest.

"Logan!" I've gotten so used to the voice that I don't even have to wonder who it is without their face.

My back is up against a tree, my feet stretched out in front of me on the grass. A half finished sandwich with over-processed meat and pale yellow cheese that could pass for plastic, rests on my lap. It sounds and looks disgusting, but it doesn't taste half bad and I have to eat something to sustain my growling stomach.