Teenage Story – People you love
Photo credit: Carool from morguefile.com
At the lunch table placed in the middle of the cafeteria, she is surrounded by her friends. One of her friend whispers something into her ear. And they both giggle. Everyone at this particular lunch table looks the same. They all have perfectly straightened hair. Every girl at the table wears a different version of the same,T-shirt with ” cool girls” written with bold letters across the front. Their eyes are highlighted with black eyeliner, replacing their child-like cuteness with the I’m- not-a-little-kid-anymore look. This specific girl seems to choose her words carefully as she whispers something back to her friend. Her eyes tell a different story than her attitude portrays.
I was, in fact, a cool girl -obsessed,curly hair girl. I cared way too much about what other people thought and way too little about what i thought. Today, I am completely different from how I was back in school. How did I make this transformation?
It was an ordinary day at school. I was walking down the corridor with one of my friend. She was eagerly telling me a story about a girl and her boyfriend. I went along with it,trying to be completely engaged but i was feeling distracted. As i tried to refocus on her story. i heard a piece of someone else’s conversation. “Sandra has cancer,” was all i could hear. Sandra, who had barely been at school for the past two weeks, had cancer. My brain started spinning and my feet stuck to the floor.
“Did you hear that?” I choked out.
” What?” she asked, annoyed that i had interrupted her.
” Sandra has cancer?”
” Oh, that’s really sad,” she mumbled. We walked in silence for sometime and then we went to our different classrooms.
As i sat in the class that day, my mind was not at peace. I cannot describe, what was happening that day, but something was changing inside me. While going through my normal routine, my mind was disturbed.
Sandra was not one of my good friends.The only connection we had was that our lockers were next to each other. I sometimes told her i liked her shirt. She once asked me if she could borrow a pen from me. That was the extent of our relationship. She started showing up at school less and less until she stopped showing up at all. I began searching for her in the halls and then making excuses for when i didn’t see her at her locker. I convinced myself she was just staying late after class.
After a few weeks of no Sandra, i finally grasped the reality that the rumour must be true. I stopped making excuses for why she wasn’t there. But ever since I had overheard that conversation in the corridor, the way i looked at everything was different. I started to be irritated by the stories and whispers that went around the lunch table. One day i asked myself, “Why am i even hanging around these people?” If i got cancer and died the next day, i wanted to be at complete happiness. So i decided to be around people who made me completely happy. Sounds kind of obvious, but it’s something so many of us overlook.
The girls i hung around with in school weren’t all bad. A few of them were genuinely nice, but were influenced by some of their friends. I knew i need a change. I started to be more my own person and less like all of them. I stopped pretending to care about all the gossip that went around the lunch table. I started hanging out with people i actually liked. I decided anyone who made me feel bad about myself was not worth a second of my time. At the end of my school year, i found myself to be much happier. I decided to live by these lines:
Surround yourself with people you love- those people who never leave your side, who make you feel good about yourself.
So now, here I am, sitting at the lunch table placed randomly on the left side of the cafeteria. My friend beside me tells a story to the whole table. We all burst out laughing,not caring how loud we are or how ridiculous we look when we’re laughing so hard. My friend and i look completely different unaware of what our future holds, yet prepared for whatever comes next.
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