23 Shades of Blue

***Repeat these steps as needed to find your shade of blue, and realize your unhappiness. Considering repeating steps 1-23 if you need. Note: This may cause severe feelings of self worthlessness, loneliness, and depression. It will not be worth it and you will leave sadder than before.***

Step 1: Be lonely. Finding your shade of blue works best when you're already lonely, have no friends, or better yet, toxic friendships. It's like an already made thin layer of blue, a perfect canvas for the shades that will come next. This is very helpful for steps 2-23

Step 2: Search for friends. Search for friends, try to make meaningful connections, it's best if none of them work out for you and you end up crying and worse off than before.

Step 3: Join a group where you feel like you fit in. Find people that you think like you, and you like them too. Meet a girl who soon becomes your best friend. Maybe she was always supposed to be. Maybe fate is playing a cruel joke on you. You don’t know yet. Not really.

Step 4: Become closer and closer to your friend, as she pulls farther and farther away. She tells you things she doesn't tell others, you snicker together at inside jokes. When you stop trying, she'll come crying back to you, suddenly, you're the villain. You abandoned her. And you start to believe it.

Step 5: Realize you like girls. This step is self explanatory Maybe you knew, maybe you didn’t. But now it’s undeniable, staring at you in the way your heart speeds up when she says your name, in the way you search for her in a crowded room. It may or may not be a good thing for you, but it’s there, and it won’t go away.

Step 6: Tell your friend you like girls and all is great and nice. She says she already knew.

Step 7: Get closer and closer with your friend, and push away the ever growing feeling of something more. You tell yourself it's nothing, that you can control it. You are wrong

Step 8: Watch as she gets in break up after break up with boys who don't love her and grow sadder and sadder. You listen, nodding in the right places, offering comfort even as jealousy coils in your stomach like a snake. She deserves love. Just not from them. Just not from people who will only ever see pieces of her when you see the whole thing.

Step 9: Secretly celebrate inside when she tells you she's Bi. Hope is dangerous. You tell yourself not to feel it. You do anyway.

Step 10: Get even sadder when she leaves you with your other friend at the county fair so she can go hang out with some boy.

Step 11: Watch as they get closer and closer, until he's all she talks about. Watch until she gets to the point where she cry's all the time when he tells her he liked her better before she dyed her hair and when he try's to tell her that he thinks she doesn't love him. Watch her wilt in his hands, and hate him for it. Hate yourself more for not being the one she chooses.

Step 12: Try to comfort her when you're secretly deep down happy that they aren't working out, and you hate yourself for that too.

Step 13: Convince her to try to break up with him. Watch as she doesn't listen and gets even sadder.

Step 14: Watch her playfully flirt with you and make jokes about how everyone thinks you two are dating. Laugh along. Pretend it means nothing. Watch as deep down all these playful flirts make you love her more.

Step 15: Sit there while she confides in you that she likes a guy while she's dating her boyfriend. Try to convince her that she doesn't like him, she should only like you. Don't say it out loud.

Step 16: Invite her to sleepover and sit there while she dyes your hair purple. Let her dye your whole head of hair so that you can sit there longer with just you and her talking.

Step 17: Watch as she finally breaks up with her boyfriend, just to move on immediately to someone clearly taking advantage of her.

Step 18: Get angry every time she talks about this new boy, until you are full of hatred and jealousy towards him. Until it’s all you can feel. Until resentment becomes your new shade of blue.

Step 19: One day, confide in your old guy friend that you like this girl. Sit there while he talks to you for an hour about it and listen to him tell you he's sorry. Regret telling him immediately and make him promise he'll never tell anyone. Go home and cry because then you know for sure that you do like her, and it's not just a glitch.

Step 20: Settle with the flirtatious remarks and playful touches realizing that's all it can ever be.

Step 21: Tell her that you have the fattest crush on her and watch as she laughs it off thinking it's a joke.

Step 22: Lay in her lap silently when she says she would kiss you but she thinks you'll get mad. Promise her you won't get mad. Get nose to nose and stare at each others faces and then laugh at how silly this seems. Except you're laughing because your nervous. Hold her hand as she walks around, holding tight to her hand so she can never let go. Stand there while she wraps her arms around you and realize she's never hugged you before.

Step 23: Wish that she'll kiss you, but she never actually gets around to doing it. And as you lie awake that night, staring at the ceiling, you wonder—was she ever serious? Or were you just the punchline of a joke you didn’t realize you were in?