The Girl with the Ocean eyes

I was a loser. I was a too-tall, overweight, closeted girl with no social skills. I had spent two years trapped inside the house with my family hiding from an illness that was killing millions of people. I spent those two years playing Minecraft, watching any people skills I had slowly crumple into nothing, and fighting with my sister. My parents decided it was time for a change so they packed up our home in the big city to move us across the country to a small town that was centered around its high school and middle school. 

I had long brown hair that I didn't know how to take care of and had no sense of identity or style. Everything I wore felt wrong, everything felt like it was suffocating me. So for the first day at my new school, I wore a pink dress I hated but my mom loved. No Necklaces, no earrings, no rings no accessories of any kind. The dress looked awful, its empire waist only making my weight stand out like it was a neon pink sign. As I stepped onto the bus that day, I was hit in the face with the smell of sweat, candy, and snot. I had never ridden the bus to school before that day. Now I ride the bus every day and I've not smelled the smell in almost 4 years 

Another thing that helped nothing was the fact that I was paranoid about catching COVID-19 so I wore a bright pink mask. So I sat on the bus, my bright glass-covered eyes being the only thing that the people getting on the bus could see, and watched as older looked at me with disgust, the younger kids with a hesitant curiosity. 

The bus driver was an old elderly man named Art who could barely hear for crap and yelled a lot but is one of the sweetest people I know. He wore the same blue tucker hat, he wore every day, that day.

A younger boy who was about five sat in the front seat with fair spiky hair yelling about how evil school was. Four years later that little turd is basically my brother. 

In the seat across from him was his twin sister with long brown hair who was kind to all and the devil to her brother. She still sits with me in the mornings on this same bus, talking about anything that comes to her little mind.

One thing I always found strange about the elementary school was that there was the main school building, then a black road and then there was the school playground that consisted of a purple and orange intricate web of different playing objects. 

The older Kindergarten teachers stood outside of the doors. They stood there in floral dress that half flew away on windy days, collecting the Kindergartners like mother hens, and yelling at older kids causing problems in the small courtyard outside of the entry doors. The school was originally just three long hallways stacked together but in recent years they had added a new gym and an extra hallway for the 4th-grade and 5th-grade classrooms. The walls were painted bricks that started purple at the bottom and quickly turned white as you went farther up the wall. The floor was a gray tile that was very smooth, so smooth most kids' feet slid across it. I can’t tell you how many people I saw fall that year. 

Outside of the Classrooms in the 5th and 4th grade hall were breakrooms. Breakout rooms consisted of a large whiteboard on one wall and a large half-circular table in the middle of the room. There were also windows out into the hallway and into that teacher's classroom. Each teacher had a breakout room and sometimes shared one with another teacher. 

They were supposed to be used for small groups to head out into the room and work quietly on their projects while also having separation from the rest of the class. If you went to a breakout room you got nothing done. That was just the law. I played board games in those rooms every few weeks and one time threw whiteboard markers at a girl I hated.  

We're going to call my 5th-grade teacher Mr Bog. Mr. Bog was tall with a thick brown beard that had small strands of white in it same as his hair. I always remember Mr. Bog wearing a red flannel and holding a can of Mountain Dew, to quote him specifically ‘it was his addiction’. He had circular glasses that he wore far down on his nose and I don't believe there was a time when I didn't see him smiling. He was a kind man and my favorite teacher I had ever had until I had my seventh-grade English teacher Mrs. Kimberg, who in my opinion is the greatest human to have ever walked the Earth. 

As you walked through the door to Mr. Bog’s room there was a long line of Oak wooden lockers on the right wall. The lockers ran almost the entire wall until they stopped and transformed into a countertop with a sink in it and a microwave on it. Next to the countertop was a cupboard. I remember this cupboard specifically because it had a witch drawing someone had drawn three or four years earlier hanging unstably there with Scotch tape. I think he still has it there to this day. 

The desks were arranged in small pods around the room. They were triangle shapes that fit together perfectly. They had fake wooden tops and drawers underneath that had purple and orange accents. Orange and Purple were our school colors so everything had purple and orange on it. When you walked into a room it either looked like we'd murdered Barney or that we dropped an orange paint can on the floor, or a strange combo of the two with white thrown in there. 

Under the wall to the breakout room window were bookshelves that had books of all colors and sizes. I sat by that bookshelf for most of that year next to the girl that would make me realize in the following year that I was gay. She was shorter than me with long straight hair and would never stop putting on lip gloss. 

I wouldn't come to sit there until around 3 months in. The first place I sat was right next to Mr. Bog’s desk. I sat next to two boys and a girl. One of the boys was taller than me with spiky almost white hair and an attitude that sunk of a large ego and a god complex that would make me hate him. The other boy was shorter than me with freckles all over his face, dark greasy hair,  and an unpronounceable last name. The girl was taller than me with severely fair hair and the shyness of a fox but the mind of one as well.

My parents had been married since 19. Growing up with two parents who were severely in love with each other, access to romcoms, and an overly excitable imagination I believed and I still believe heavily in the notion of soulmates. During my delusional thoughts of moving to my new school, my brain had come up with the fact that I had to meet my soulmate on the first day of school. This led to a very odd encounter with the most popular boy in the grade, my home phone number, and a legacy that has followed me to this day but we won't talk about that. On the topic of this crazy notion, I proceeded to have a crush on both of the boys who sat next to me and one of the biggest idiots in the entire grade all in the 9 months of that school year.

 I learned from this and stayed away from boys and realized girls were for me.

Nobody had talked to me very much that whole morning. I had kind of just sat there and quietly listened to Mr bog explain how the mornings would work. We were given an agenda we had to get signed by our parents every night to get candy at the end of the week. I got it signed the first 6 days, and then proceeded to lose the agenda and never get it signed again the entire year.

I have a habit of losing things which was proved the next year when I lost 5 water bottles, a boot, and an entire sled in my first year in the Middle School.  

The first thing we did every day was have specials. The specials at my school were Gym, art and music. I loved music because our music teacher was one of the greatest ladies ever. Her name was Miss Hornet. She was a tall lady who wore loud heels that looked like they were made of wood and had short greasy hair, she also wore festive sweaters and could make anyone laugh. 

We had your stereotypical gym teacher. She wore tracksuits and had a buzz cut, and even though she worked with children for a living she seemed to hate them a lot. One of the funniest things that happened that year was when one of the boys threw a dodgeball directly into her face.

Our art teacher was a tall loud lady who would not stop talking. We would spend the first 45 minutes of her class listening to her give the same instructions she had already given yesterday and because she talked for so long it took forever to get any of the art projects she gave us done, meaning everyone was always behind. Art was the class we had that first day. The art room was huge with three rows of desks and a large desk in the very front and center of the room for the art teacher and She normally kept a projector behind her. Her desk was cluttered with everything in the world. I don't remember specifically what she had on there but I just remember it being everything. There were drying racks to the right of her desk where your artwork would get stuck to other people’s artwork or get lost or destroyed. 

For some strange reason on the door, she had a ‘you leave when the teacher dismisses you’ sign but it was in Spanish. In the back of the room was a large half-circle sink that you turned on with a foot pedal that went all the way around it at the bottom. 

I sat at the first desk in the first row. It was the clearest choice and I truly wasn't ready to try and sit next to someone. I knew I was a loser and I knew I had no social skills so I had not planned on trying to talk to anyone.

And then she was there. She was much shorter than me then and still is. She wore light brown boots that had small heels and zipped up on the side. The dress she wore had the texture of a jean jacket at the very top with silver embezzlements but then turned into a flowy teal skirt at the waist. Her hair was a dark chestnut that flowed down her shoulders, and she had a nice light face that was welcoming. 

But what captured me were her eyes. They still haunt me to this day and I see them in my sleep. In the middle, they were a light blue, like a baby blue almost but too light for that. Around the edges, there was a somber blue. The somber blue didn't fade nicely into the light blue, no, it cut into it, like a knife cutting the flesh. Sharp, angry, violent but in the most beautiful way.

“Hi, I’m Hadley you must be >>>>” She was the first person who had spoken a direct word to me the entire day. I remember being terrified of her. She was my best friend for the rest of the year, I stayed by her side and I hung out with her friends cuz truly I didn't know who else to be around. 

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Me and Hadley grew Separate Ways. We had different friend groups in the sixth grade. In sixth grade, I met a boy who I unknowingly fell in love with and who would break my heart the following year. She struggled with a toxic friendship. 

Just when thought I would never talk to Hadley again, she showed up and became my friend again and I poured my soul out to her again because she's the easiest person in the world to talk to. 

Then there was this girl in the 7th grade, she'd been one of my best friends since 6th, and I got a crush on her in 7th grade. She had midnight-dark eyes, and what I thought was the prettiest smile. We’ll call her Lux. After liking her for almost 5 months, I decided that this crush was stupid and that I should move on and I thought I had. Hadley asked me out that summer and we dated for a while. 

I ruined it all by having a freak out because I realized I still liked Lux and so I broke up with Hadley over text of all things! Me and Lux dated for two months until things came to a head and I realized Lux was a sociopath who scared the crap out of me. 

Hadley came back to me soon after. She chose to be friends with me again, to be my closest friend, to listen to everything I had to say when no one else would. 

I realized about a week or so ago that I dumped the girl I could have married to date someone who was only going to be in my life for two more months. It is the big mistake of my life.

I've dreamed of my soulmate since I was 5 years old. I can't wait to meet them but I think I already have. I think it was the girl with the ocean eyes who sat next to me when no one else would and loves me when I don’t even love myself.