We Can Be Ghosts Now

She felt different.
   Of course, she realized that everyone probably thought themselves different at some point in their life. So she dismissed her thoughts for a while. But each time they came back. She couldn't understand why she felt this way. Isn't that how human beings are meant to be? Are all human beings desperate, and lonely? Desperately lonely. And lost?
  Not lost-in-the-grocery-store lost. No, she was always lost. She could be in the middle of a crowd of people she knew and she would undoubtedly still feel lost.
  Everything made her curious. And her curiosity frightened her. She would find herself wondering strange things, thinking thoughts that she couldn't imagine crossing her mind. When they surfaced, though, oh, how she would wonder. She could just sit and stare at something - the ceiling of her bedroom; the moss-encrusted bricks of her porch; the sky - and not be bothered by anything.
  She loved music. She could get lost in a song as swiftly as taking a breath or blinking. When something unpleasant was happening, such as a fight in between family members or her younger sibling causing a ruckus on a road trip, she would simply turn up the volume of her iPod to drown out the noise. Music was her escape, her inspiration, her muse. She wanted to drown herself in it. She wanted to share her findings with others, but no one ever seemed interested, so she kept to herself. Who cared if no one else heard the music? She listened to it, and she loved it so very much, and that's all that mattered to her.
  Sometimes she thought she saw things. Shapes. Dark figures that appeared for just a moment, just long enough for her to glimpse them. She saw them everywhere, and every time she did, she would stand still and wait for them to appear again, and when they didn't, she moved on. These phantoms intrigued her the most. She wondered if they were real. And if they were real, were they coincidental, or did they mean something?
  She wanted more in her life. She was afraid of living only a mundane, ordinary life. Screw ordinary. She was sick of it. She was already the plainest of the plain. Brown hair that never looked right; it was always too wavy, or too flat, or too frizzly. Her eyes, that could be described as somewhere between light and dark blue. Freckles, braces, boney shoulders. What on earth made her special?
  She had friends, if you could call them that. She cared for them, each one. But she felt like many of them were absent-minded towards her. And who could blame them? She didn't. If they felt like that, it was obviously something to do with her. After all, she was quite strange. The things she enjoyed -anime, various TV shows, books, music- they all affected the way she was presented to people. And some of them chose to stay away because of her interests. Or because of the way she acted, or the people she hung out with. She understood. But that didn't mean she had to like it. They were her choices. And she hated feeling like she chose wrongly.
  She was always afraid. Not of certain things in particular, like the dark, or scary movies, or monsters. She was afraid of being alone. To put it plainly, she was afraid of being abandoned. After all, how easy is it to forget about another high school girl, the one who watched that TV show, who wore the fandom t-shirts, who wrote those weird stories and drew those pictures. She felt like a wallflower. She was at an impasse: she was loud with friends, but dead silent with strangers. She was terrified of being introduced to people. She believed that everyone had walls, and if she crossed them, she would regret it. She was never too forward, because she was afraid of hurting people.
  But sometimes she could be brave. She felt brave with him. She would dare to let her knee touch his, or to lean against him on the couch. She would rest her head on his shoulder for brief moments. She would hold his hand, and she wouldn't move away when he put his arm around her. She talked back to him and teased him, as he did to her. When others would attempt to make a move on her, she would tell him to show where he stood, and this would draw him to do things that made her heart flutter. She would grin when he fought for the seat beside her, and apologize when she failed to save one for him. But even in everything he did, the little things that could pass as hints, she had her doubts. Why? Why would he act like that and do it all for her? Compared to the other people he knew, the other girls he was close to, she felt insignificant.
  She knew that some people cared about her, cared about what would happen to her. At least, she thought that some people did. She hoped so. But even in everything that gave her strength, everything that made her laugh or smile or hope or dream. Despite everything that should show her how much she should mean to the world and the people around her.
Despite everything, she felt small.

"Meet me in the white light as the city slowly lifts away.
We can be a ghost now, 
with the memory of another day."

Song: We Can Be Ghosts Now       Artist: Hiatus (feat. Shura)