1.
Since I was a little girl, I have been in possession of a deep longing to belong. As a species, we are not meant to be alone. Designed to socialize, an article from the American Psychological Association on Life-Saving Relationships states that “strong social relationships increase our likelihood of survival by 50 percent” from data extrapolated across an analysis of 148 studies citing social disconnect as a risk factor equivalent to physical inactivity, obesity, or even smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
As far as my body is concerned, I have been a routine smoker for at least a decade of life.
2.
In my formative years, I was constantly changing schools. I went to different institutions for preschool, kindergarten, first grade, and second grade–only then, settling down for the remainder of my elementary years. During second grade, I made my first best friend in a long series of best friends. Her name was Lyric.
But then after summer, I skipped the third grade and was accelerated to a different classroom, with other children–older children. Suddenly, I only saw her in the hallways as we came and went for our respective lunchtimes or recesses, our budding friendship now estranged.
I was quiet in my fourth grade class. We were only 14 kids, and every one knew each other already. The process of bumping me up a grade had taken some time, and in the three weeks I was testing out of one curriculum into the next, my peers had already picked lunch groups and partners.
3.
As an only child, I had always been predisposed with the confidence to make myself friends. There had been no siblings to come back to. Once I was comfortable in my new classroom, I slowly came out of my shell, learned to associate confidently with my older peers. I became friends with two white girls, Anna and Liz, but found myself caught up in the strangest dynamic in which I played mediator and third wheel all at once. I was inside but out, constantly come to as closest confidante for their respective problems with each other, yet strangely foreign and extraneous when they would make up and go back to being best friends. I was filler.
I found myself longing to be more physically in tune with them as well. Liz was tall, her eyes able to survey my yellow scalp where my black hair swirled around its part, and she was already wearing a real bra with light pads in their cups. Anna was all angles, with a regal nose that had a strong bridge and high high cheekbones that made her smile angelic. Their hair was long and blonde, spun with gold; their eyes were both crystal blue.
With my short shorn black hair and tan skin and flat brown eyes, I was the black sheep of our group.
4.
In developmental psychology, Erik Erikson is known as the father of the eight stages of psychosocial development in which he defined eight age brackets from birth to sixty-five years of age and beyond. During the years of middle childhood, somewhere around six to eleven years of age, we go through the fourth stage which he called “Industry vs. Inferiority”, where children learn social skills and begin to develop confidence in their competence in different areas of their life. Incredibly important in terms of young self-esteem and as an indicator of future success in social situations and relationships, this stage is not to be taken lightly.
5.
In the wild, elephants travel in herds of females, the wisdom of the oldest matriarch providing guidance to protect the herd. Lionesses band together for protection against lone males and to raise young in the pride. As a gregarious species, humans are no different. As social creatures, we can survive alone, but we live better together.
6.
After I “graduated” fifth grade, I hoped for better in middle school.
At first, it wasn’t. I found myself like something of a traveling circus in middle school. My brunette, blonde, fair skin-toned peers would ask me how dark I became in the summer, rave about how lucky I was to stay “tan” all year round. They touched my hair and praised its silkiness, its straightness, the inkiness of the black. I felt conflicted inside, happy because they all seemed so nice, and I had never experienced such attention before, but strangely small, at the same time, because I had never felt so invisible while being seen.
And then, I met Georgia.
Georgia was everything I had hoped for. I don’t recall exactly, but I think her ethnicity has something to do with pacific islander; either way her skin was “tan” like mine all year, her hair dark with subtle brown streaks in it. Her eyes were blue, but she was just different like that; and unlike me, she had somehow cracked the code. She held conversations with our classmates, even dialogues where she was an active participant, discussions that were not centered around her physicality that seemed to alienate me while embracing me. With her friendship, this foreign social landscape became navigable, the microaggressions and belittling scarce, and my security in a relationship began to grow as well. We doodled together and read books together, and she taught me how to facetime from my iPad, so we could do homework together. Hers was the first number I ever had that wasn’t someone in my family.
But this did not last.
7.
Summer and other periods away from school, I was simply unavailable; this was time spent with family.
Georgia knew this. We promised to text each other when possible, and we wrote to each other “HAGS!” (Have a great summer!”) in our respective yearbooks.
On orientation day of seventh grade, I was shivering with anticipation. I couldn’t wait to hug her, to hear her voice.
I was absent-minded during orientation. The hallways were a flurry of activity, parents and children stuffed into the overcrowded hallway as everyone met teachers, found classrooms, put school supplies into lockers. My eyes searched constantly for her distinct form, my ears piqued for the sound of her laugh or her name.
When she finally appeared around the corner of the hallway, I jumped away from my parents and skipped in her direction. I called her name, my voice full of excitement and warmth; when her eyes found mine, there was an emotion that I couldn’t place in them that stopped me on my path.
Thinking back now, maybe it was coldness.
That day was a preview of my year. I spent seventh grade invisible. Georgia did not see me. She did not know me. She did not acknowledge me. I was air that she walked through, noise she blocked out, peripheral to all she saw. And others were complacent to this.
Lunch on the playground.
I sat around with all the other girls, our starched uniforms warm under Florida’s October Sun. It had taken me months to work up the courage, but I was ready to try and call her attention in front of a crowd.
“Georgia?” I said diagonally across the table to her.
In disbelief, I watched her continue on with her conversation. Incredible, honestly, the way in which she kept her composure, in how her eyes never wavered, her voice steady in timbre. It was eerie the way the conversation continued without me. No one nudged her or made my presence known to her. They just carried on. A cold, icy feeling gripped my chest and spread, numbing my body. I was outside, again.
8.
On the last day of seventh grade, while everyone pushed to erupt out of the hallway exit onto the stairwell that led down the second floor outside to the courtyard to the freedom of summer, I pulled my ex-bestfriend into a deserted classroom, imprisoning her inside with my frustration.
To this day, I cannot recall what all I said specifically. The words used in that moment and the frustration that had mounted from a year of being a ghost seemed to flake off of me, bits of my memories floating away like ashes from a volcanic eruption. My mind was blank when I climbed into my parents’ green 2007 Toyota sienna as we drove away for home.
9.
Now in my twenties, ironically, though I can barely recall the specifics of the event, this is the moment that I most often return to when my relationships with other women experience turbulence. Sometimes, I return to it to remind myself that that was my lowest moment, and I was able to move on from it.
Sometimes, I return to it involuntarily.
When I do, I recognize that the immediate snapshots I see of Georgia in my mind are synthesized for my benefit. The glisten of her eyes, the remorse on her face.
When my memory is true to itself, it remembers the blankness of her eyes, the lack of recognition in her expression. When I am honest with myself, I understand that I was alone in that room, the deliverer of a monologue masquerading as a participant in a conversation.