to my shoelaces

two - the day after

The day I met him was the day after Valentine's day. The weather was still utterly cold, even though it was the middle of February already and I had assumed the hardest days were over, but still, I started to shiver ever so slightly every time I had to change rooms or leave for lunch breaks. The halls were very tidy at this time of the year because  everyone made an effort to present our school as nicely as possible to show its good sides to possible students who were on the lookout for the best school before deciding on their change to high school. I was always wondering who would possibly choose this place with its grey walls, its stinky locker rooms, its broken neon lights, but still, there always were quite some people who came to look around campus. I envied every single one of them. Not just for having a choice and for being open to new possibilities, but even more for their time. I felt like everything had passed me by in a flicker of the eye, and now I was 18 and almost leaving for college - at least, if everything went according to the plan I had in mind. Some time ago, I had just made the plan to go to college after high school. Now that I was so close to graduation, I didn't actually know how exactly that would work or if I could even afford that. What I also didn't know was who was going to force me to apply for college or get a job, since I couldn't imagine ever getting out of this rut on my own. I was always very sure that I would never be able to do this on my own. I hoped to get help from people like my parents, even though it never felt like they were the best help. Don't get me wrong, I loved my parents, both of them, and I still do, but they were just not the best at changing something in my life. My dad was always very busy and my mother just didn't know things, she was not much more than street-smart. Regardless of her emotional intelligence, her kindness and her loving way of approaching every minor and major inconvenience in my life, she was not the best at solving them. She was the one who had sent me to a shitty psychologist at the age of 12. This psychologist's way of treating me, of "curing" me, as he put it, was that he always listened to what I said and then tried to convert all my problems into some sort of consequence of my early childhood experiences. He had probably learnt this Freudian approach at university  - or, as I had assumed at the time, from a free webinar via Skype - but it wasn't really transferable onto my life situation and my actual experience or perception. My lack of memories from the ages zero to six, in his modest opinion, were caused by abuse. I couldn't remember much from my childhood, but I think that I would've recalled some sort of traumatic experience. If you ask me, my lack of memories from this time period was solely caused by the passing of time and, most importantly, the literal inability of children to actively memorize things from their babyhood. It's just impossible, I guess, looking back.

Well, so much about my parents and my time at the quack doctor's office. February 15th was a dull day, if you have ever seen one. All my classes were too boring to remember. The problem with school wasn't that I felt I was challenged and therefore overwhelmed, it was rather that I felt this terrible sense of an underwhelming anathema. It felt like both a blessing and a curse to still be in school. On the one hand, it gave me a sense of structure and familiarity. The people around me were the ones I had spent the last couple of years getting used to. On the other hand, they were still all these people, such a huge amount of faces, and all these boring lessons, all these boring teachers telling you about things you either already knew or didn't even ever want to know. Modestly, I got to admit, I was never a genius in school. The only reason I was bored was my sheer arrogance when it came to things I didn't understand. I was a good student, but never a good learner. If I didn't understand something, I just let it be and passed the exam with the lowest grade possible, so my stamina regarding ambitious studies was just as bad as my grades in subjects I couldn't entirely grasp understanding of - and my actual stamina. Some things I just decided not to let hurt my ego.

So the day passed. On my way home, I passed all the people who I knew from school. I would be lying if I said I recognized none of them, I had always been actually always extraordinarily good at remembering faces and the place or event or occasion I knew them from. Some of them I had talked to before, but most of them probably wouldn't know my name if they'd been asked to recall it. As I said, I preferred to talk little and hold back - mostly, that was. However, I observed, I watched, I evaluated everything that I spied with my little eyes. Sometimes I wished I wasn't ignored as much, but then I remembered that it was my own fault. I wasn't outgoing or straightforward, I was just too ... me. And me, personally, I just didn't tend to act like that. Going home, I saw all these houses with their flawless facades, probably just as superficially perfect as the people inhabiting them. Inside, everything was probably a mess. And if it wasn't, this problem of chaos and muddle was presumably transferred onto the happy family that decided to build a house of bricks and concrete. I didn't know much about building houses. What I knew was that I hated everyone who was happy enough to buy or build a house where they could sit around the kitchen table with their loved ones. I saw through all of their windows how neatly they arranged the furniture in every room, how they decorated their space with photos and pieces of memories.

To sum it up: I was jealous. I envied the happiness that they had that I wasn't promised by my own situation. My family was never wealthy enough to afford anything beyond a small apartment with a trickling tap that held me up at night. The drops of water became a flood of insanity, every single one of them reverberating through the walls loud enough for me to hear. I envied how they were able to talk about things that kept them from pursuing happiness in their lives. Their parents understood. Mine would have too, had I ever overcome my pride and opened up. I was too proud to admit to them that I wasn't their perfect daughter. They knew about my laziness, about my hardships with some subjects at school and about how I wasn't putting much effort into approaching people. What they didn't know and what they couldn't ever know was that I was bored with how they raised me. I was bored from all the lethargy swinging back and forth through our familial every day life. I watched the commercials with the laughter and the cakes, when the wife baked one and everyone was just so happy to be part of a thing, of a family. My family just wasn't like that. The moment I came home, I felt this sensation of indifference. It was as if my parents were toddlers who lost interest in their new toy the moment they got it. My family was impacted with this sensation. Of course, we used to do things together, but those were just the last faint traces of effort they put into this project. Internally, I speculated, they most definitely called this their little project. And it had failed, they were just too busy to notice. Often, I wondered why they didn't just get a divorce. The way my mother guilt-tripped my father sometimes, the way she treated him differently when he didn't give her what he wanted. Vice versa, he met her with great distance every time she did something for herself. He wanted everything from her, and when she gave it to him, both of them were unhappy. They weren't co-dependent, they were just equally messed up, with qualities of both the abuser and the abused. It wasn't entirely decipherable who had to get therapy, if not both of them had to.

The moment I arrived at home, I shook my shoes off my feet and tossed them into the corner we kept them in. Judging from the lack of keys on the kitchen counter, I assumed that nobody except myself was home yet. The thing with my parents also was that they never came home at specific times. Sometimes, my mother had the habit of coming home at noon, sometimes late in the evening, but it was never foreseeable what she would choose this time. My father wasn't much different when it came to that, so, in a way, they were very similar.

After I put away my coat, I took my bag and went into my room. I didn't have a habit of making much of a mess, so it was quite organized and neat. Others would have said it was just dull or naked, with the walls all white and the shelves all empty, but I preferred to describe it as orderly assembled.

The moment I saw it, I swung myself onto my bed. It wasn't a habit of mine, usually, but this day extraordinarily called for a quick rest of the body. Before I knew it, however, I had gotten my phone out of my jeans pocket and started scrolling through Instagram. I saw them all, I knew them all, I followed them all, the kids from school. At least ten of them were named Alex or Ethan and they basically all looked the same. The only way I knew how to not mess up their names in my head were the absolutely fucked-up nicknames they had all given themselves online. Sometimes, I saw someone in my head and thought, oh wow, look, its 'ethanslife', which was pretty cringe, if you ask me. This, however, was the only way I knew how to tell one person from the other. Scrolling through social media always made me quite sad - not that I would've ever admitted that to anyone - because I saw what I was missing in life and because it held up a mirror to me, its reflection nothing but my own lack of the slightest bit of effort. I kept scrolling and scrolling until I finally put away my phone and started staring at the ceiling instead. My eyes already were already watery from the brightness of the display, so the ceiling with its hazel paneling built a heavy contrast to the fabricated illumination.