The cement wall feels incredibly cool against my burning back; the lunch bell screams out like a dying animal and transfers its pain to the hundreds of ears of students. My eyes scanned through heaps and clumps of drifting cliques. No one’s here yet. I hated that about myself sometimes, the way that I’m impeccably early in the weirdest times and in the time that I need desperately to be spot-on on time- I’m just not.
For a few moments I feel like the loner-girl everyone points to, the one who floats around looking for her friends, half of whom must secretly hate her. Then I realize; I am that girl. I try to dismiss the vacant holes, the faces of people I’ve known –it seems since I was born. I open my lunch box only to feel the slight condensation of an ice pack that has been melting like summer ice cream for the past three days.

Right on cue, my stomach feels as if it’s punching me from the inside out; I lift the lace of my camisole trying to figure out if my navel juts out slightly less than the day before. A shadow casts itself over me and I can feel light coming to the quickly paling cheeks of mine- until I look up. Is it possible that a face you’ve kissed and held softly with your palms, can make you cringe and melt all at the same time?

Maybe it was the trace of the person I knew; the fading freckles and dawdling boyish charm that made me ache inside, that made me do what I do to myself. The blinding force of falling for someone, or rather the idea of something so unconsciously that it hurt sat beneath the surface of every broken heart.

This hurt I let so willingly attack my most significant insecurities; when I pick apart every flaw of my complexion, whine about my thighs looking like the kind you get in a KFC bucket, and resort to wearing a one piece bathing suit, even in my own backyard- that was hurt, always grabbing hold of my vulnerability and putting me to shame by ways of degrading my human flaws.

I could feel his eyes burn into my heart; almost as if he was uncasing all of the mushy guts of feeling in there, which I had locked away from people who clearly didn’t have the capacity of sensitivity to care. Then came the realization that hurt was just a running catalyst for the face behind it- him. He knew just as well as I did, that I would let my own growing stubbornness keep me from looking up from my previous eye level.
Looking straight past him like an irrelevant wisp of air, the only view conjured from my point was one of his arm scooping into a plastic, disposable bag filled with potato chips from his own lunch box. Lucky you, I couldn’t help but let the thought run through my mind, even for a mere moment that he can eat without a rush of guilt, remorse, or the worst- pain.

I could feel my eyes glazing over as the bag became emptier, and emptier, till there was nothing but the flattened out carcass of the plastic. That same hand that draped around my shoulders and wrapped me in a hug in that one night released its grip like the one he still had faintly on my heart. I could almost feel myself drifting and floating farther away like the bag. This time the bag wasn’t so kind as to dismiss from smacking me square in the face: we only hold on to love for as long as we think it is worth the price.

I’m disposable, just like a plastic bag moving farther away and maybe I’ll have the chance to be valued again, but for now I float.