Asterisk*

Friendship and Fables*

*As both of them being essential to life

Basking in the glory,

Bringing down the fame.

Artist,

Muse,

Running,

Break.

Marcus

 Loneliness was an interesting concept. It doesn't necessarily mean you're alone, but the feeling can mean multiple things. Sometimes loneliness could equal comfort, just because you know you can't get hurt. Unfortunately, that wasn't what it meant for me. Rather, it was a sense of sadness, just feeling that you didn't have a shoulder to lean on when you needed it the most.

I used to like being alone because I didn't really know what to say to people. I lived in my own little bubble, pretending like I was winning the Nobel Peace Prize in my bedroom. Once people started pairing off, I started looking for comfort, in whatever way I could find it. Friends, family, a partner. None of them really worked out, but for a while, I did think I found something that could mimic what other people had. Even if they all eventually let me down, it was nice to believe in someone for a while.

I always tend to associate innocence with childhood. As soon as you start learning how the world works, everything just seems scary. You start losing everything you believed in as a child. Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny. However, I definitely disagree that seventeen is your last year of being a "kid." High school forces you to grow up. If you don't, there's a door for you to walk out. Once you start middle school, most of the innocence is scared out of you anyways. Usually it's your family or teachers, but now it's more like the internet that scars you enough to know better than to believe.

When I started to grow up, everything started falling apart. Things that I thought shaped my entire life no longer mattered that much. I started to lose myself in what I thought I was and what I was pretending to be. I'm not even completely sure what I was doing at the time period because it was so shaded in tones of grey that I couldn't torture myself to remember it.

Kadance and Aiden were a big example of what I thought was an essential point in my life. We somehow kept getting put in the same class all through elementary school. We all had pretty alphabetically close last names, so we usually sat near each other. Eventually, we realized it would be pretty beneficial if we just became friends, so we started talking. At five years old, you have a lot in common with everyone. We used to bond over our love for Thomas the Train, our matching Target backpacks, and how we all had the same favorite slide on the playground.

As we got older, I realized I didn't have much in common with them at all. They started having conversations about girls and sports, things that I had never gained an interest in. Parties started to be the epicenter of fun and they gained about a dozen new people that they could hang out with. Sometimes I wondered why I still hung out with them, but I think it's just because I want to retain that last shard of my childhood. Once they leave, so does everything else. They were people I had known every day for what seemed like forever. I couldn't just walk away from that.

I had finally texted Nova back. Once I did, I found out that Kadance had texted me. I didn't even open it. I was just afraid of what he had to say. He could hate me now that he was a 'cool college kid.' In general, I had always been closer to Kadance than Aiden, not that I was close to any of them, but if I had to choose one I was closer to, it would be Kadance. Aiden was always the "leader" of the group and we would simply just follow whatever he said for the longest time. This eventually simmered down, but it had become almost instinct to follow whatever he strung us along to do.