Naivety That Comes With Bricked Wall Staring

The problem with having the same set of friends for the past seven years of your life is the struggle that comes after. You think you get the foresight and you get the hang of this whole social interaction thing until you eventually realize that you've surrounded yourself with a whole bunch of freaks that society wouldn't consider normal. Aspiring musicians, artists who draw with their hands, iPad kids, theatre obsessed losers, or even the people in between the normie loser equilibrium. I'm already in my third year of college, and I'm still coming to terms with the realization that my normal is actually not normal in the eyes of others. I enjoyed it. It's almost as if my friends and I lived in a world only our eyes could see, and if stepped on by others, a landmine would go off and turn their skin into meat. I saw no problem with my refusal to wake myself from that dream at first, simply because I loved it.

If that was the right term for it, then loving was my weakness. Before I even realized it, my friends had already drifted far away. Almost as if they'd woken up without me. They'd ridden whatever waited at King's Cross to find their destiny in another place, while I still stood by the brick wall and fought the desperate urge to bash my head into it until my forehead drew blood.

Everyone was in such a hurry to leave me that I didn't even realize time itself had moved forward as well. I didn't notice until the smell of a damp rag soaked in gasoline made my snot turn black and made me feel like I was getting lung cancer. Not to mention the heat burning my skin the moment I got off the Manila bus that smelled like a three-month-old infant had vomited on its carpet.

I was then sure that I was not adapting well when white-collar workers driving their black Toyotas rushing to work barreled toward me while I debated with Jesus whether it will hit me or not. Jaywalking does wonders. It could just be naivety on my part and my oh, so terrible instinct about when to cross the street, but maybe it would've been better if it had hit me the five times it missed me in my first year alone. Maybe then, I wouldn't have come to the realization that the normalcy I was so desperately clinging to was an illusion and something I would never get again.

To be normal you needed to talk to people. Like, actually talk to them. Start a conversation, keep following that despite not having the same interests and let the jokes and shared humor carry you (miserably failed at that already). You need to go out with them after school despite needing to catch that 3 hour ride home. You get drunk, go to clubs, dance until you pass out, make out with someone you just met and wake up from one of your friend's bathroom toilet with puke all over the floor. I didn't enjoy it. I never enjoyed any of it. I never understood what made it so appealing, and I hated it. But I think that's what made me alone.

I hated everyone. The friends I've considered solely mine are drifting apart from me now. My mother thinks it's because I care about my friends very deeply but I think I just have attachment issues and a huge fear of abandonment that replaced my sadness about it into anger. What was the point of all those years? I never understood it, but maybe accepting that gap and letting new people in would clear it up for me. There might be other people who will show me an entrance to another world, and I sure do hope I get the keys to the gate right.