Three Months

I am but a wallflower.

I am the girl who sits in the back, who never speaks, who shrinks away from crowds, who’s name no one ever remembers.

I am the girl who avoids everyone, and whom everyone avoids.

High School was going to be survivable

If it was anything like the movies, I would be nothing but a blurred face in a massive horde of hormonal teenagers

Unrecognizable, undetectable. Status: Stealth Mode Master

If only it was like the movies

Instantly, I was the target of archery practice. Arrowheads soaked in verbal venom ripped holes through my pride, until nothing more remained but the worn-out mask of humiliation.

I would go home every night, collecting the broken fragments of myself in my trembling hands.

I strained to patch up the stranger in the mirror who stared blankly ahead, her eyes dark and dull with grimy strokes of exhaustion painted underneath, only to find the roll of tape was as empty as me.

I hated change, and yet:

I needed change.

Sophomore year I chose a new school, a small school.

A desperate reach for an escape; a sanctuary.

But climbing ahead felt a lot like falling back.

The oasis was but a mirage.

Old problems peeled off like jaded Band-Aids once they were healed

But now I stand at the crossroads between left for isolation and right for heartache

Each paving a pathway too narrow and too dim to even look down

Afraid that it would swallow me up and hold me hostage in the dark recesses of life’s underbelly.

In all the chaos, I remember a freshman had told me to give it three months

Three months everything would become increasingly tolerable

Three months it would all be ok

Month one I wore the wall like a new pair of skinny jeans

I boxed in the baritone of my anxious beating heart

I locked myself behind a façade of evasiveness and ambiguity.

Silence and Detachment assigned to defend my gate

The gate that I didn’t plan on opening any time soon

Month two I found out I was a runner.

Not physically but emotionally,

I could hear my classmates banging on the gates begging me to come out.

The curtain of deception seems a bit pointless now but I need to protect my broken image

But how am I supposed to chain the gates shut when the people who are prying are individuals I see every day

Month three

Of the few friends I had before, many had decided to give up on the lost cause that was me

I could not go back

And with the Iron Gate blown down, everything was pouring out like an infinite fountain of words and incoherent phrases

I was too afraid to continue here

I was stuck in the crumbling state of limbo

Indecisive of what I should do my as my own fears slowly began to cave in on me

I was a hopeless cause in their eyes.

Until I met him sitting in the back of geometry

He became the light that illuminated the wreckage, the fire to my burnt out wick, the color to my canvas, the sun from behind the clouds

He was my best friend

He had tamed me

Senior year

Like the puncture wounds from the arrows still left scars all along my reflection

My insecurities and many of my fears never got completely healed.

But many of them became patches sewn onto my skin that define who I am today

People ask me frequently

“How is it so easy for you to be vulnerable in front of other people?”

I smile

“ I like to see where I started and where I ended up because I am proud of how far I’ve come. Every time I see a mirror, it gives me a chance to personally define who I am and what kind of individual I want to be”

Every time I see a mirror, I see…

Me