I listen to the murmured voices of the lunchroom around me. All are monotonous and jumbled together. They are uttering nonsense, trying to get others to regard them. I notice the varying types of lunches my friends' have, but the only thing I smell is ketchup and yogurt; it makes me nauseous. The others talk to each other and over me, dismissing me. They seem to have regarded me as unworthy of their breaths. I have carried this loneliness with me for a long time. I hardly remember a time when I didn’t feel the dread of being unwanted, a time of simply being happy.

Initially, I didn't recognize myself: the girl inside of me. She has a sad gleam in her eyes that no one seems to notice. She has a war going on in her head. The girl wonders who will win; her or the loneliness? She is sad and constantly questions herself. She always has a mask covering her actual emotions. I sometimes don't understand why I feel this way: lonely and unhappy. The way I see it, every problem has an origin. As I continue to think about my loneliness, I wonder how it started. Perhaps it was in the fourth grade when a new girl came to school. My best friend started to play with her more than me. The girl was nice, but I was resentful towards her. I assume that this is one of the prime reasons for my loneliness. 

I consider the root of my solitude to be my adolescence. When I was a child, from an infant to six-years-old, I lived with my parents. They were drug addicts. It was no place for children to live: the hot water, gas, and electricity often got shut off, there was hardly any food in the house, it regularly had a pungent odor from the drugs, and strange people were always visiting. The stand-alone thing I remember is after we got kicked out of the house. We bounced around from place to place, often staying in our van, until my mother had a psychotic break. We were living in a friend's house at the time. She had freaked out from withdrawal and started screaming and raving. She grabbed my younger siblings and was ranting and mumbling about nonsense. My dad tried to talk her out of her trance, but she didn’t listen. She jumped out of the living room window to escape. The police found her hours later. This experience as a whole affected me to where I couldn’t make friends since I didn’t have anything in common with them. I didn’t feel they could relate to me.

Furthermore, I got diagnosed with Kawasaki’s Disease during one of the most influential periods of my life. It happened in the sixth grade when two elementary schools merged into one middle school. Everyone was meeting new people and making new friends. It was towards the end of the year. I hadn’t been feeling well and was out of school for a week before I went to the emergency room. After being in the emergency room for hours, I got sent to a children’s hospital. I was in the ICU for a week and could hear alarms blaring after children had medical emergencies. Even now I remember the antiseptic smell of my room. I recall waking up and feeling long, pointed needles going into my back to remove fluid buildup. I even still see when my family visited me and had to wear light blue surgical masks so they wouldn't make my condition worse. The overall experience was traumatizing and hard to go through. When I had returned to school over the next few weeks of my being out of the hospital, everyone treated me differently. They had pitied and judged me. Everybody stayed clear of me because they were scared. They had caused me to become even more lonely.

Overall, I am falling into a bottomless pit: long, dark, and scary. This abyss swallows me whole. No matter how hard I try to stay out of the everlasting hole of emptiness, it pulls me back in. The pit of oblivion is like a void deep within me: hollow, yet significant. The unending hole of despair is leading nowhere. It engulfs me in and confines me. The hole crushes me down until it gets harder and harder to breathe. The abyss is similar to that of being in a pit of quicksand; the more I struggle, the more I sink.