Imagine a place where you are alone. It's all hallways and staircases and doors you don't quite recognize. Sometimes you see people you half-know, sometimes you even talk to them, but usually you just sit and listen to them talk to each other.
You're doing everything wrong, here, but it doesn't matter just yet. You know it will soon. Soon, the consequences will catch up with you. They haven't yet.
You smoke a lot of cigarettes.
It's always the same here. You're always the same. You're a ghost, haunting this place for centuries to come.
You don't eat.
Your friends don't notice.
You don't spend enough time around them for them to notice.
The people in the smoking section don't notice either. You don't even really know them. Some of them are in your classes, but you don't really socialize in class.
You don't know any of their names, but sometimes they know yours.
Despite your confusion and anxiety, you feel calm. This place is almost meditative for you. You sit and smoke and stand and smoke and walk and smoke and ride the bus and make your way to the store to buy more cigarettes.
Usually, you don't have any money. Sometimes you're not 21 yet. You register this as a building anxiety in your sternum as you desperately search for a way to procure nicotine.
You hang out at the smoking section. You hang out outside buildings. You pace through the same three circles of your life while the craving runs its course.
Usually, that's the extent of it.
Now imagine a different place. The same place, but different. You are alone here, but this time you are actually alone.
No strangers roam the halls with their half-remembered faces. There are no store owners to be inadvertently disrespectful toward. There is only you and a blank, featureless void.
You would like that, wouldn't you?
You're in a hallway.
You're in a hotel, or a parking garage, or something. You just keep walking and going up stairs and around corners. The scenery changes. You're looking for the exit, maybe? Or maybe your old room. Yes — that's it. You're looking for your old room.
Did you leave something there…?
You're in high school. Or middle school. It doesn't matter; it's all the same. You go to your classes. You haven't started ditching yet. You haven't fucked up yet, but you know you're going to.
Your friends see you differently these days. It used to be all in your head that they could see what was wrong with you, but now the wrongness is plastered florescent on your every move.
He never particularly wants to sit by you.
You find your room and it's empty. You start to unpack your things. Your roommates filter in, chatting and getting things arranged. They make plans to go somewhere, and you stay back.
You wander the halls like a ghost. You pass the common area and bypass the cafeteria entirely on your way to the smoking section.
You miss it.
You're on an island. Nobody here but you.
You see a little girl. She looks like you, but not quite. Her face is drawn with horror and regret and unsaid apologies.
She vanishes.
You need to find her again. You need to tell her it's okay. That you understand.
You don't see her again. She doesn't want your forgiveness.
You tell yourself she was you. That little girl begging for you to apologize to her for abandoning her. It's easier to cope with if you only have yourself to blame. You can change yourself. If it's you, you can fix it.
The little girl doesn't exist in the real world. She doesn't want to. She can't quite cope with what she saw, and she doesn't know how to confront the fact that she left you there.
It wasn't her fault. The brain is a funny thing, and when a child sees something too violent and difficult for them to comprehend, they blot it out. Their brain goes onto autopilot, just trying to pull them out of the situation as fast as they can.