Phi is the depression of an angle. It is a circle with a capital I going through it. It is the 21st letter of the Greek alphabet, and they connected on a spiritual level in trigonometry a few weeks ago. One might ask why someone would connect so deeply with a letter in the alphabet of an empire that was once great, but is now dead. The answer is really quite simple: he himself was also depressed. His name was worthless information, and his age was somewhere between 15 and 20 years. He was overall a completely uninteresting human being, and he knew it.

The worst battles we have are the ones that we are fighting with ourselves. He wasn’t just in one battle; he was fighting an all-out war. He wasn’t sure if he was more afraid of the depression that had settled in his chest, or the angry thoughts that he was having about it; either way he was slowly losing interest in his normal daily activities, and even his closest friends weren’t reason enough for him to smile.

He didn’t want to do anything anymore. That doesn’t mean that he wanted to sit at home in his room, because he didn’t want to do that either, he really just didn’t want to do anything.  Wanting to simply cease to exist was a foreign feeling to him, though he wasn’t sure if it was really a feeling at all, because for a long time it seemed like he wasn’t really feeling anything. People had told him once that being depressed was being sad, and he was sure that was part of it at the beginning, but he knew that being depressed was really just feeling entirely like nothing at all.
Every morning he would tell himself that he absolutely had to get out of bed, because if he didn’t who on earth was going to make sure that he had, and that was almost more depressing than having to go to school. He pulled on jeans that he found on the floor and a shirt that probably didn’t match his eyes now that they were grey instead of blue, and ran his fingers through his hair in the way of a make-shift comb. He still bathed himself regularly because depression was no excuse to smell like the backside of a donkey, but when it came to being eye candy he couldn’t care less if he was falling short.

If someone had told him that he looked a mess he might’ve actually smiled, but no one bothered. He wasn’t sure if they all assumed that he knew, or if they hadn’t actually noticed, but in a way it was insulting. He would’ve told them if they looked like a bunch of zombies with an unfortunate case of bed head. Then again, it was a lot to ask of his peers to talk to him after he had been blatantly ignoring him for the past half a year. It really wasn’t his fault. If they’d had anything interesting to say to him in all that time he might’ve made an effort.

In reality, listening to them prattle on endlessly about the disappointed nature of their parents feelings toward them, or their feelings about the party they’d been to that weekend could’ve possible been better than listening to himself think. His brain never shut up. The thing was like a parrot that a naughty child had trained to talk, and wouldn’t even be silenced by the cover going over his cage. Sometimes it told him about how much better he would look if he got up off the couch and worked out. After that sometimes it told him about the girls he could have if he hadn’t been born so socially awkward. Occasionally it would educate him about his lack of emotions and their cause which was the fact that no one really cared about how he felt anyway. He was his own only friend, and he hated himself.
The thing about being nothing and feeling nothing is that one would expect that meant doing nothing also. Though that was close to the truth, he still did the mechanical things that he always had. He brushed his teeth and he did his work in class. He walked from school and back every day and sometimes he would buy dollar pizza at the Kum and Go on Wednesdays. When a girl would wink jokingly at him in the halls he would wink back. Perhaps that was why no one seemed to notice that the light that had once hidden its self behind his eyes had long diminished.
He had tried crying once. The thing about crying is that men should positively never do it. He felt weak and pathetic, and the tears stung his eyes and tasted entirely too salty. Hours later there were still red rings around his eyes and a dried snot trail from each nostril. He felt like a fool, and looked like one as well. He had tried cutting himself once. After that he had to hide his wrists and take care not to catch his scabs on the material of the long sleeved shirts he was forced to wear. He smiled instead, empty smiles that meant nothing and hurt worse than tattered bloody wrists.

There were a few times when he had debated asking for help. He wasn’t sure who he would ask since his mother held no interest and his father was never around, but he still thought about it. The counselor at school seemed nice. She was young and wore shorts skirts and liked to sit on the edge of her desk and flip her hair. Risking his masculinity by telling her about his internal struggles was not an appealing idea to him. He had far too much testosterone running through his youthful veins to admit weakness to someone so attractive and young, so despite her professionalism, he had never found it in him to confess.

Sometimes he thought that the root of his problem did not lie within himself, but in the fact that no one paid him any mind. He couldn’t remember the last time that anyone besides himself had taken interest in anything that he was doing. Close friends had never been at an abundance in his life, and he was born a “spoiled” only child. Spoiled in the sense that his parents provided him everything accept love and affection. There was a girl in his year who occasionally told him he looked nice or would offer him a smile when they met in the hall, but beyond that even she seemed to blur into the list of people who didn’t notice his existence at all.
Loneliness wasn’t something that he experienced often, but when he did it was painful and mostly without a cure. Today he noticed that it was especially bad, perhaps since he had missed the first three hours of school without a call to his home or an absent mark on his attendance. He walked slowly down the hall and made eye contact with a few of his peers hoping that it would obligate them to say hello. None did. His locker was right across the hall from the one belonging to the girl who liked to flirt with him occasionally and solely out of sport.
She was pretty in an interesting way. Beauty that was recognized by most people was the very obvious and occasionally flashy kind. It was the very essence of dyed blonde hair and red lipstick with a slim figure and tight clothing to accentuate it. That was the kind of beauty that made people gasp. Grace, as she was so aptly named, was pretty in the way that made him sigh with longing.

It wasn’t often that he admitted to himself that he had developed some sort of feelings toward the only female who even occasionally gave him the time of day. Yet he couldn’t help it as he stood watching her hair fall softly over her shoulder as she leaned to get a book from the bottom of her locker. Perhaps it was the loneliness eating away at him, or the feeling of being mediocre in personality, but he wanted to prove to himself that he could talk to her if he wanted to.

He was staring at her like a fool. His back was pressed to his locker and his palms were beginning to sweat. His better senses were telling him to stay put and not to bother the exotic creature that was staring back at him with a raised eyebrow, but his lips wanted nothing more than to open and his vocal cords wanted to produce sound. His animal instincts kicked in when she sauntered toward him, most likely to quiz him about his strange behavior, and he wanted to bolt, but instead he did something completely unimaginable. He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek.
      Absolutely stricken would’ve been a good way to describe the feeling that hit after his lips left her pleasantly warm and unexpectedly soft skin.  He could feel heat rising to his cheeks, the kind that would turn them pink and show off just how embarrassed by himself he was. He waited for the slap of her hand across his face, or the knee she would probably send to his family jewels. Instead, she laughed. She tilted her head back and parted her purple-painted lips, and laughed.

The sound was bright and melodic, and for a moment he was sure that he was imagining it. Then it embarrassed him more. This, his attempt at intimacy of any kind with another living creature was funny to her. He had battled his senses and ignored warning bells that had been clanging so loudly in his head to work up the little bit of courage that he had left, and she was laughing at what had resulted. He felt as if she had slapped him after all. He turned to go, intending to leave in a hurry and try to keep a speck of dignity. She wouldn’t even let him have that.

As he turned to flee the scene of his not-so-minor indiscretion, her small hand clamped around the top of his arm and stopped him in his tracks even though he was considerably larger and more muscular that she. He mentally prepared himself for whatever joke she was about to make, or insult that she was going to throw his way. What a lowly creature like himself had been thinking by talking to such a lovely specimen of pure femininity was beyond him, but he had already committed his crimes and was now ready to receive his fair and rightful punishment.  

“Walk me to class,” said a voice from somewhere near him, then again, “I said, walk me to class.” As unbelievable as it was it seemed to him that the demanding tone was coming not from the locker beside him, but from the small girl who was holding roughly onto his upper arm. His thoughts were confirmed when she roughly jerked him around and paraded him down the hallway like a farm girl might her blue ribbon winning pig. He felt like a swine.

“You’ll retrieve me from class as well,” she informed him in a stern tone before she disappeared into her classroom, leaving him in the hall completely stupefied. He carefully meandered to his next class, taking care not to run into anyone as he stared dazed at the floor. Apparently he had done something correctly, though for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what it was.  Perhaps if he didn’t figure it out this time, he could do it again by accident. Perhaps he would ask her when he retrieved her from class. For the first time in a while the little voice in his head had stopped going on about how terrible he was, and focused instead on how exquisite she was, and for a moment, he thought he might have been happy.