Apathetic Girl

Apathetic Girl.

That's what her English teacher had called her in the seventh grade.  It was to allude to her demeanor. It was a harmless joke, but it forever changed how she knew people thought when they looked at her.

Apathetic Girl.

That is what she presented as. Her real name had no meaning to her anymore. She was an Apathetic Girl now. Ancillary, background dry-pan comic relief. The name of a last-minute character in a movie script.

Apathetic Girl.

The description echoed around the back of her brain. And from time to time she heard it again and was reminded of people's immediate perception of her. She remembered googling the word on her phone in the cold bathroom stall after her teacher had said that and everyone had laughed. In on a joke she didn't know had even existed. Apathetic: "showing or feeling no interest, enthusiasm, or concern." She hated how accurate it felt.

Apathetic Girl.

She is in college now. Living in a dorm with a stranger. And nothing had changed like she had expected it to when she moved in. She had a maximum of 3 friends at a time. And she was always busy, her computer like a second home at this point. She felt as though she never left it, glued to it. Always something, always working, never sleeping. Her demeanor had not blossomed or changed like she thought it might.

Apathetic Girl.

It wasn't like she could not have enthusiasm. She just did not possess it often enough to where it became a personality trait. It was not one of her recognizable features. She often caught herself, her image, her face in various domestic setting windows. Stores, coffee shops, buses, cars, and phone screens. The corners of her pouty mouth facing down, the lowered eyelids. And she could understand why so many people saw her as such.

Apathetic Girl.

Maybe it was vain. Even a little narcissistic to think about your own face in a default way like she did. But people tended to point out that her face did not hide her emotions well. When she thought to herself that her face did an overly amazing job at hiding her raw emotions. Even when she didn't ask it, it kept its stony facade.

Apathetic Girl.

But she could not understand how her face had gotten that way. Other people's thoughts had gotten to her too much. Comments she thought had been forgotten were resurfacing in her ocean of a head. She was starting to drown in that ocean. The idea of people's perceptions and ideas of her when they didn't even know her was stifling. Every glance she'd ever caught out of the corner of her eye, every time some stranger had brushed past her rudely, any funny look ever cast her way, or malicious whispering about how she always seemed to be alone. It was consuming her. Submerged in a nightmare world of her own making. Waves crash on the shore.

Apathetic Girl.

18 and useless. 18 and has achieved nothing. 18 and not happy. 18 and not successful. 18 and not popular. 18 and not admired. How could she have spent so much time, she thought, and have nothing good enough to show for it by now. 18 and wilting away. 18 and crying quietly under bed covers. 18 and feeling like a 6 year old again.

Apathetic Girl.

There under her pale green, fuzzy comforter, she lay still. Her head hurt with self-chastisement in which she thought of her complete disaster of a life. A waste. Face sticky with tears. Her mind was anywhere but where she actually was. Blaming herself, it was her fault. It had to be her fault she was like this.

Apathetic Girl.

The phrase, the words were beginning to lose all meaning as they tend to do when you keep saying them over and over again. Repeated. The English language is no longer there. It becomes clear that we were all just muttering odd sounds on a rock, in a void.

A p a t h e t i c  G i r l .

In the exploration of the cause of her apparent grief. There was a blurry thought of her father. There was a suggestion of her father somewhere. A memory of his highly affectionate smile toward her brother. And uncertainty when he looked at her. A pat on the head and never a hug. A recollection of his genuine awe at her brother's accomplishments, yelling so loud at his games, over the chained fences on sweaty summer days. Opposingly he would send Apathetic Girl to the concession stand to get him fries with old bay. And never told her to get anything for herself. Her dad never looked at her in awe or seemed to have expected her to be good at anything. Her father had loved her, she knew that he did, he had told them all the time that he loved them. He had read books to both of them before sleep when they were small and shared a bunk bed. He loved them. But he never held her hand when they crossed the road, she always held her brother's hand who was holding her father's hand. And he had never tried to convince her of anything if it was over two sentences long. He always just gave up halfway and walked away. If she couldn't agree with her dad in a couple seconds he would give up on her like she was the most unreasonable being that had ever existed. She grew to not have high hopes in his thoughts of her. She grew and adapted to expect that she simply was an afterthought to her brother in her father's eye. She loved her father, and they shared similar traits. It was just that she never knew her father and her father had never tried to know her.

Apathetic Girl.

"Oh," she breathed out in a long-awaited sigh.

She was an Apathetic Girl because she was expecting herself to be an Apathetic Girl. Uninteresting, unimportant, unfazed by any development. Because she was still seeking approval, still a little girl who wanted her Dad to hold her in such high regard as he did her brother. And because she never had that she thought of herself all the things she assumed her father must think of her as. So she becomes this invulnerable person who is hard to know.

Apathetic Girl

She jolts up out of bed. Because she understands. She knows herself better than the description of Apathy. She knows there is capacity within her to be more than that. She crawls to one end of the bed, where the window sill is and she pops it open, an April Shower is coming down. Splattering the pavement, she can feel the warm humidity of the storm's wind. She leans against this window sill and lets her mind clear itself and for the first time in a long time, she is smiling. She is smiling because she knows. She knows life is more than what she's made of it so far. And that the past does not matter because it isn't happening. And that the future is equally as unimportant because it's impossible to wrangle. And most significantly other people's ignorant opinions of your appearance, your face, doubly have never actually had any weight. And, finally, she is 18 and she is learning and doesn't have to be successful in a specific career to enjoy things. She knows that the refreshing backsplash of the rain is making her happy, and that's all life has to be to matter.