Lights Are Missing (PART 1)

1.

Sitting at my desk, I realized a few things. Not that I hadn't before, I always knew these things about myself and about the people around me, but I never really had the time, or the mental capacity to actually think about how they affected me. Until then, of course.

My eyes wandered the room, passing by all the pretty girls, passing by the teacher's vacant desk, completely skipping over the groups of people who were all in lifelong friendships that I'd always dreamed of having, and my eyes landed on the only cloud in the sky.

My music was blasting in my ears, my eyes following the lone cloud in the sky, and my foot barely touching the ground. Something about the whole scene I was living in that moment just felt wrong.

Not that any day I lived felt right, but I felt like it could've felt more right. Something I did in my life was wrong. I wasn't like the rest of the kids. I didn't get to hang out with my friends after school, or do all my homework because I took honors classes or any of that.

My life was boring. I woke up, went to school, went home, took a nap, ate dinner, then went to sleep. That's what I did every weekday. On the weekends, maybe I'd go shopping with my sister, or we'd go visit my aunt, but that was really it.

Seeing people have the things I never got was what hurt most. I hated seeing people with friends, friend groups were the worst. Even seeing people doing homework when they should've been doing work for that class hurt me. I never had to rush to get a big project done. I had it easy, but that was boring.

The group I was most jealous of was a group of guys I only saw 2 times during the day. My last class, and my gym class. They were always either walking around the track shoving each other and laughing about things I wish I knew, or they were playing basketball, ignoring all of the real rules of the game so they could just mess around.

Soobin, Taehyun, Heuningkai, who everyone just called Kai, and Yeonjun were names known throughout the school, yet they weren't famous to the point that girls were drooling over them, at least not to their faces. Part of me always wondered if maybe I could've been popular like them if I'd just taken another turn somewhere in my life.

As jealous of them as I was, I didn't know them. Sure, I knew their friendship pretty well, I knew that they'd been friends for about 5 years, and that they were always at Yeonjun's house, but that was just from overhearing, not that I purposefully eavesdropped on them. I didn't know them as people though.

I didn't know their interests, or their family lives. I didn't know if they had pets, I didn't know their favorite seasons or what their plans for the future were. Not that I wanted to, not that I cared to learn that kind of dumb stuff, but something deep inside me told me that it was best for me to start caring.

That was my issue. I was never going to make friends if I didn't put in the effort, the acknowledgement that I'd need to do more than just let them like me. I had to like them too, but that was something I had a hard time doing.

It's not that I didn't like people, I did, for the most part, but I was very picky with what I wanted. I didn't have any interests, no posters on my wall, my phone background was a picture of my sister and I, and I rode my bike everywhere. I had no idea what I wanted in the future, only the present. I wanted to live, to enjoy my years of being a teenager before they were over, before I graduated and moved on to a bigger life where I'd likely end up just as sad.

The only way for me to live, I knew, was to make friends.

Slowly, I took my eyes off of the cloud that I was apparently leaning to see as it had gotten so far that I couldn't see it from sitting normally. The song that was playing in my ears had changed to a new one, but I quickly grabbed my phone and paused it before taking out my earbuds and unplugging them from my phone. I wrapped the wire around them before shoving them comfortably into my pocket.