To: The Boy Who Sat Next to Me All Year

How dare you? You, Boy Who Sat Next to Me All Year, failed to perceive the outside world around you. You sat in your seat, like a bullet shell, lackluster in the dirt, eyes shining with intelligence, ironically glazed over with disinterest. With all the wonders of the past collecting in your brain, cloudy and convoluted, you couldn’t see your future. You couldn’t see me.

All the hours spent in the morning, parting my hair perfectly to precision were fruitless. All the clever lines, all the excuses I made to talk to you are as only as useful as the history we studied. But my story was one that we never studied, or that you never studied, or that was simply lost in between the lines in the pages of our textbook. I know these things. I know these things thoroughly and concretely, without doubt and with such sadness. Your facial features never changed. I looked for your praise and approval in your eyebrow wrinkles, a quest just as successful as the search for the Holy Grail. The space in between your ear and your chin that you forgot to shave told me nothing. You were there, but the person I wanted you to be never was.

Your attention was an ethereal light that never shined on me. Boy Who Sat Next to Me All Year, I demand an explanation. You have wasted my time. I have consumed too many pieces of gum to make my breath smell nice to let their sacrifices to go unnoticed. The clothes that did not represent my personality burned my skin, and if you had only told me upfront that you were a dull, listless little thing, you could have spared me. Boy Who Sat Next to Me All Year, why did you make me suffer?

Boy, you need life in your blood, instead of the running network of veins composed of facts and schoolwork needed to achieve an A+. You need to be more of a person. You need to experience wonderful human emotion because right now, you’re like a calculator or maybe an android – working without happiness or a reward. Frankly, my dear Boy, that is not how a teenager should live. Your eyes are blue, but do I see the raging ocean in them? Boy, you’re as pretty as the sky, but just as empty.

Teenagers are most happy when they express themselves, or when they have stimulating activity in their lives. You need this, whether it may come in the form of me, or drinking, or lacrosse, or anything that would make you happy. I say you need poetry and literature and music. You need beauty and light. We can start with the small things, you and I. We could go to parks and watch birds. We could play with dogs and look at stars. I could teach you about sonnets and you can teach me about sports. We can be at equilibrium, perfectly balanced. I can enrich your life, and you can enrich mine. Because right now, Boy, you are stuck in a rut. You are sheltered and innocent, and I intend to change that, simply because you cannot go dancing about life like this. Your simplicity is endearing, but you’re going to be hurt by humanity if you don’t know how to handle it, you friggin' robot! You’re missing out on all the things that make you human – the things that are fun and astonishing, things that will make you smile so that your smile will make me smile. I want to show you the world. We can grow, like letters grow to form words, like flowers grow and reach sunlit goals with their petals. We can be something beautiful together, if only you could see it.

So, Boy Who Sat Next to Me All Year, I’m going to dare you to notice me. Meanwhile, I’ll dare myself to make you notice me.