Runner up - Senior section

Southern Christian College

It’s the days like these that it feels like the whole world is asleep. Teenagers with dark rings around their eyes dragging their feet to their various destinations, fighting off the biting cold of the Tasmanian winter with hoodies that definitely aren’t a part of the school uniform. You are surrounded by chatter, but no one looks like they are listening. No one looks like they care.

I pull every article of clothing that I’m wearing into myself. I’m secretly hoping that if I pull them tight enough, they will swallow me whole. I hate this. I hate being surrounded by the people that won’t miss me if I stop showing up. I hate being in this world that moves in slow motion.

The air is cold on my face and I’m so grateful for the sting that it gives my cheeks. Eleony finds it weird when I say that winter is my favourite season. Who could possibly like their fingers feeling like they are about to fall off every time they step outside, right? But I swear it’s the only feeling that keeps me tethered to the reality that sometimes threatens to disappear before me. This cold air shakes the thick cloud out of my head and reminds me of the days when everything seemed simpler. I drag my feet to my classroom and slump in a chair next to Eleony. I smile at her. She smiles at me. We both know it’s fake.

We participate in the friendly small talk that we feel socially compelled to do but neither of us feel like it. Eleony is a girl with a bright smile and blonde, shiny hair that looks like it’s never given her any grief at any point in her life. She is confident and walks into a room with her head high. She also wears long sleeves every day to hide the scars that she likes to pretend don’t tattoo her arms.

I try. Please don’t think I don’t try. I don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I am fairly certain that I have to do well to get there. The endless string of uncompleted homework and staring into space in class doesn’t come from a place in me not wanting to do well. However, sometimes I just can’t muster the energy to care about how the Russian revolution came to pass, when I feel like the world is swimming around me. The walls make me feel like I’m suffocating in a weird, claustrophobic nightmare. How am I meant to retain any of the information that they are throwing at me if I  feel like I can barely breathe? Thanks a lot, anxiety.

After the day is over, Eleony and I walk to the bus, laughing off the fact that neither of us remembers anything from our humanities lesson. People always ask Eleony why she is even friends with me in the first place. After all, I am an awkward and quiet kid who looks like only half my body developed, and Eleony is this gorgeous queen that can actually hold a conversation.

She tells people that it is because I’m actually this really smart, funny person and that I’m just a little shy. I’m almost certain that is not true. I am not funny or particularly intelligent. The real reason she is friends with me is because I am the one person who cares. I know what no one else sees and I still stick around. Everybody is broken and hurting inside and anyone who tells you that they are not, is lying. This is all a big game of who can hide things the best and  the longest.

When I step off the overcrowded bus, that smells like a bunch of kids who don’t know how to use deodorant, I walk further down the road. I fix my eyes on the cracks on the pavement then glance at the graffitied slurs that tattoo the fences around me. My house is one of the many identical  grey houses on this matrix of identical streets in this entanglement of suburbia. As I swing the front door open, I collapse on my couch. Photographs of our family spot the walls, but I am the only child left at home to look at them.

My eyes tear up. I don’t know why, but it feels like I have lost so much. When I look at the table in the corner where Hayden and I used to play chess, or the empty vase that Sally would always grow flowers for, I feel like there is a part of my life that I didn’t appreciate when I was blessed enough to have it. It feels like there is a hole in my chest that is irreparable but can be numbed if I squeeze hard enough.

I pick up my phone and stare at my reflection in its black screen before clicking it on. I feel it swallow all my attention, as I scroll through photos of people with their perfect lives who smile at me with their shiny teeth. I don’t know these people, nor do I care about them, but I still feel myself comparing my acne to their perfect skin and the layer of soft flesh on my waist to the lack thereof on theirs. Inadequacy. It is defined as the act of not being enough. I can’t be. I’m giving all the energy and effort I have to offer, but it is never living up to what people want from me. I can’t have those grades when it is taking all that I have within me to deal with the voices shouting at me inside my head. I can’t be beautiful because I can’t look like all those people that have good genes and money to afford lip fillers. I can’t give what it takes to be the person everyone expects me to be at school, when just talking to a group of people cripples me with anxiety.

I can’t do it. I can’t be that. However, tomorrow I will wake up and live through the same day, trying to be that girl all over again.