She loved to sleep. Sleeping was pure. Sleeping was relaxing. But most of all, sleeping was an escape. Sure, she had all the necessary things in life: shelter, loving, married parents, enough food, enough money, and clothing. But it wasn’t enough. She always felt like she was missing something; like there had to be more to life than her own pathetic existence in the square baby blue bedroom she had grown up in. She’d always felt horribly alone. Her friends always left in some way(moving away, changing schools, growing apart). She hadn’t fit in at her elementary school. The kids there were particularly cruel. Some days she would just go home and cry until her eyes went dry. It was never over something stupid like someone making fun of her name. It was stuff like people calling her ugly (every day), moving away when she was near (like she had some kind of infectious disease, which wasn‘t the case), rubbing their arms (or other body parts) on a desk when they touched her, malicious variations on the “Roses are red, violets are blue…” poem (“Roses are red, violets are blue, God made me beautiful, what the hell-o happened to you?”), people whispering about her all the time, playing on her naiveté, and others playing “Ugly Girl” by Weird Al Yankovic whenever she was around. One group of girls even made up a party that the two fourth-grade classes were supposedly having just to get rid of her when they were talking. This made her extremely defensive/ paranoid. She’d think people were just picking on her when they told her she did something wrong(except teachers). This made her seem mean (even though she wasn‘t…just very hurt). She didn’t know who to talk to. She felt like an outcast. If people DID talk to her, she’d wonder why. Were they testing her? Were they trying to embarrass her? Did they actually want to be her friend? Did they just want something to laugh about at lunch? (Usually, people only talked to her if they wanted to cheat off her, borrow a pen, or have something to eat like candy).She’d wonder what was worse: feeling invisible or having people treat you like you were invisible. She’d question why people were so cruel to her. It wasn’t just because she had fair skin, crooked teeth(this was before braces), and glasses was it? Was that a reason to treat someone so cruelly? Why did her whole table at lunch seem to lessen each day, eventually leaving her alone (this created a phobia of sitting alone in the lunch room in high school) and making her feel even more like crap? She felt like she would never get these answers.

Sometimes she felt like her life was just a long string of disappointments slightly (only slightly) tinged with some happy moments. She used to joke with her parents that she had the worst luck in the world, but it wasn’t a joke. It was the truth. Bad luck seemed to follow her everywhere. Remember the loving parents mentioned earlier? Well, I didn’t mention that she had a brother, who can fairly be described as a violent asshole(especially when he hit the teen years) most of the time. He thought (and he told her this often) that she was stupid and had no common sense. He would make fun of her because her thoughts went at a thousand miles a minute and sometimes what she wanted to say wouldn’t come out right. You know how when someone says “Don’t touch me.”? You naturally want to touch them right? Just to break them out of their seriousness? You don’t expect them to, for example, punch you in the arm(hard) do you? Or if you won’t get off their bunk bed (because you’re playing around), you don’t expect them to punch you in the ribs, do you? You don’t expect them to hurt you just because you took the last pudding, do you? Well this is what happened to her.