Confession #8

I have very little recollection of my first year of high school.

To clarify, I remember quite well all the emotions I felt, but the details and events escape me. It's true that memories fade over time, and this was almost six years ago, but I remember my second freshman year, and I remember the eighth grade well enough—seventh and sixth too, for that matter. The only explanation I can come up with is that it was such a bad year that I mentally blocked it out.

My most vivid memory, depressing as it is, is the time I was nearly late to class after lunch one day. That day I had managed to worm my way onto one of those abnormally tall chairs placed along a bar rather than at a table; I didn't need a table anyway because I had nobody to sit with. I ate my hamburger and drank my Sunny D and had my trash thrown away before the line for food had even disappeared, because when there isn't anybody to talk to, eating doesn't take very long at all. After climbing back up into that annoyingly tall chair, which actually took me a try or two, I reached for my favorite binder. This was not just any old school binder—this was the binder that I pulled out at every spare moment in class, the binder that occupied my lap for the entire bus ride home each afternoon, and the binder that I took everywhere with me when I wasn't at school at all. This binder was my best friend.

It was an old binder that I had lovingly rescued from the depths of the storage cabinet in the study, and it looked as if it had been shoved into a locker one too many times. I'm sure it had been a crisp white once but it was now a dingy shade of gray. Its corners were bent and the plastic torn, exposing the fuzzy and worn cardboard within. Tucked inside the clear front cover was a folded piece of notebook paper with the quote "Never underestimate the power of eccentricity" scrawled in my handwriting. It looked ratty and unappealing, but I loved that binder. It was the only constant thing I had in my life at that point, and I could always trust it to be full of clean college-ruled notebook paper, pages just waiting to be filled with whatever I chose to write.

That particular day, I am not ashamed to admit, I was working on a fanfiction. This was during the height of my obsession with the show Smallville, and I was currently rewriting the events of the third season. It pains me to say that the fanfiction, in reality, was atrocious, but I was proud of it at the time, and it took my mind off of how lonely I felt. That is, it took my mind off of it right up until the point when I glanced up and saw that I was literally the only kid in the cafeteria. I had been so absorbed in my fantasy world that I didn't even notice the loud roar of voices had fizzled out and everybody else had gone off to class. The shock and terror didn't subside until I scooted into class just seconds before the bell rang, and then I was hit with a horrible sense of being completely alone at the school. Not just lonely, but utterly alone.

That's about all I took away from that year. That in mind, I'm actually pretty glad I don't remember most of it.