Clueless

C13

                Paola and I did remain friends for a pretty good period of time, from 7th grade up to the near end of freshman year. She introduced me to her friend Deion, who was extremely tall might I add. Like 6 foot in the 7th grade. Insane. Since Paola could draw, I could write (not very good back then), and Deion was pretty creative when it came to ideas, we decided to make our own little comic.

We called it, "The Three Faggoteers", it isn't the most appropriate name for 13-14 year olds, but there's a story behind the name I swear. As I'm sure you're aware, bullying was, and still is, a thing. We were always called slurs because we didn't act straight or how everyone else acted. As I said before, people who are anything but straight, will always be labeled as the odd one out, and I say that from personal experience. Whether it was coming from strangers online or the ignorant students walking the hall, we were called queers, faggots, dykes, any homophobic slur you could possibly think of. We didn't really know how to cope with being called those things besides turning pain into power. Because no one taught us what to do if we were being bullied or how to properly handle it, we did what we thought would be best. So we made it our thing.

The story wasn't interesting at all, we had a villain with a ridiculous name that had a hamster as a henchman with an equally ridiculous name. I mean, Dr. Hamster-face or something like that, we didn't spend too long on names obviously. We had an underground hideout, we each had our own rooms, pets, and choice of weapon. Our character names were Bob, Alex, and Joe. Pretty generic names, but it was the personality that really mattered right? As long as it wasn't boring, we didn't have a problem with having bland names. Sadly, we never ended our little comic book, we did fill up about 20 pages front to back though, which is impressive considering we were all very busy.

At the beginning of that year, I was able to choose whether I wanted to continue to do band, or just leave and take an extra class. Since I was very much underwhelmed about a lot of the things I found joy in before, I decided to stop taking band.

Though, as the year went on, I found out that Paola was in band and carried a similar case as I had previously. She was a trumpet. Paola and I had the same 7th class and if the teacher would let us, band students could go to the band hall and practice. She would ask me if I wanted to go sometimes and I thought that the band teachers wouldn't allow it since it was "band only". The first time I went in there was to watched her play and because it made me want to play as well.

At first, I only went maybe once a week, then it raised to twice a week, then three days, then eventually it was all the time. The band teachers recognized me from 6th grade and asked me if I wanted to use one of their rental trumpets for that period (they washed the mouthpiece obviously) to practice. Wanting to see what I remember, I accepted and started getting the feel of how it was to be playing the trumpet again.

It's safe to say that I fell back in love with the trumpet again thanks to Paola. I had retaught myself how to read the sheet music and how to properly clean the valves and slides and knew how to play all over again by the last day of school.

Although that year was filled with a bunch of highs, there were most definitely some lows mixed in as well. That's the year where my depression decided to take over the majority of my life and fill my mind with negative things. From the beginning of the year to the end, it was obvious that I had begun going through something that changed my behavior. Not a lot of people noticed despite me saying that it was obvious, by that I meant it was obvious to me. I noticed that I was slowly turning into someone that I didn't enjoy being. When people brought it up, I would just lie to them and tell them that I was tired and I'd be more energetic the next day.

Sitting in class with my friend group wasn't as exciting as it used to be, I didn't look forward to band anymore, I would ask to go to the bathroom when I didn't need to go, I went to cry. I didn't have a particular reason to be depressed, it was just a constant void that hung over my head for an unknown reason. I had been listening to more depressing, blue music that could have assisted my mood lowering, but you listen to what you feel, right?