Dot, the Stuffed Bear

        School gives me that ill, homesick feeling of just wanting to be somewhere else, somewhere alone.  Somewhere safe.  It's made even worse because I still think I want to go home before I've even stepped out the door.
        I don't know what it is about school that makes me feel so much... like waves are crashing down on me and colliding in my stomach.  I've always believed most people simply don't know I exist, so I've never been bullied, nor praised, I've just existed when I was there.  But maybe it's almost worse.  Because we all put hours and hours of our lives into being lumped together with people we tolerate but don't feel anything for because we have no idea who they are. 
        And who are we, anyway?  To dictate who we are, who they are, why we can be us and they can be them even when none know shit.  It's a whiny, teenage sentiment, "You don't know me!" Pounding on the walls and the lockers that look just like lockers everywhere else, but with their little pictures of puppies or sweet sayings or miniature portraits of Jesus, opening up the lockers and breathing "it's okay" before we move on and die a little inside.  And I still don't know why.  I don't know why the weight of a book is the weight of the world when I don't know how to hold it, or why I care that a teacher doesn't know my name.  He has hundreds of students to lay letter grades out to, and a mediocre, silent, unmoving student will never be a voice worth listening, because she has no voice.
        One day, one of my teachers told me I should talk to other people, that I'm always quiet, and I shrugged my shoulders. 
        Maybe it's because friendship has no starting and stopping points. There are no lines, this is just a sand dune and I stand with the grit in my teeth, and I can't tell if I enjoy it.  I know these people.  I've known them since middle school, many, but I disbelieve in it.  I don't talk to people because I don't think they want me to talk.  I reaffirm it to myself when the nuances of human kinetic vocabulary shrink me back into my chair because
what words
are worth saying?
        It will still be the same the next B day.  We'll sit in a circle and I will talk and then hate talking.  I'll notice that I say the same things again and it must be tiring to listen to.  
       So I just don't talk.  I want to go home.

        Curse myself out for being an introvert, for feeling sick in big crowds but wishing I liked it.  Sit with me and talk to me about Looking for Alaska, and tell me how it made you cry, too.  Open my eyes and I'm listening to Macbeth, wondering whose name is whose on cellular respiration worksheets, watching all of the people need help and refuse to let themselves need it.  Help me know how to respond to "you look nice today".  Help me know what is socially acceptable when I want to start a conversation with a stranger.  Help me know that loneliness is okay when I choose it.  Loneliness is okay when you choose it. 
        One day I sat alone at lunch, in the sun, working on biology homework.  I like to be alone in the sun with my homework.  But I let a friend talk me into sitting with her stranger friends, and spent the rest of that half hour wishing I was alone with the sun and my homework again.
        I don't like to eat alone all the time, and I don't love my homework more than people. 
        So tell me who the fuck I am, and why it's not okay, or okay, or confusing, or frustrating, or makes you smile.  I want to go home.  You can come, too.  But home is safe, and I want that.

        I don't understand it all either, but it makes me want to cry.

Even when it's rough, DFTBA