Step One: Have a friend.
Step Two: Exchange numbers, maybe social media. Compliment them and their talents. Maybe they will compliment you in return.
Step Three: Form a bond with said friend and share moments. Hang out at their house, hang out at yours.
Step Four: Share secrets, share gossip. Vent and start to feel more and more comfortable around them.
Step Five: Whenever you see each other, you hug and smile. Maybe share an inside joke or two.
Step Six: Exchange gifts and more secrets. You are always there for them if they need to vent.
Step Seven: Post pictures together on social media, you post pictures of the arcades you go to, maybe the mall, and the laughter you share. Call them your best friend, that you two are inseparable.
Step Eight: Friend finds a new group of other friends. They laugh and smile like you both do, and that makes you happy.
Step Nine: Friend introduces you to them, but you don’t share any interests with them. The group seems a little arrogant, but you try to stick with your friend, even if you two feel differently about the situation. You feel confident that your relationship is strong and better than this new group.
Step Ten: See your friend less and less. You give them their space, though it does hurt you when you can’t see them as much. Time goes by and you start to struggle, you feel lonely.
Step Eleven: Text your friend, say that you are struggling mentally, you miss them, and you need help.
Step Twelve: Get no response. Get left on delivered, or on read. You text another time, just to be met with the same thing.
Step Thirteen: Bump into a friend somewhere, you get angry. You both fight. Tears are shed, and the friend doesn’t seem to care. The friend shares glances with the new friend group, they will laugh about this later, laugh at you, laugh about you. Laugh about your weaknesses and your pitiful face as you try and understand why you’ve been abandoned.
Step Fourteen: Block your “friend.” Throw your phone across the room and suffer the silence that follows, curling in a ball in your bed and you remember the first time you and your friend met.
Step Fifteen: Ignore your “friend” whenever you see them, watch as they whisper about you to their new friend group. Notice how they smile with them as they used to with you.
Step Sixteen: Miss your “friend.” Or the person they used to be. Feel many feelings at once, betrayal, sadness and anger. Become overwhelmed by these feelings.
Step Seventeen: Feel lonely, blame yourself. Look at yourself differently in the mirror. Are you not funny enough? Not smart enough? What about your style? Maybe it was your lack of grace? Your lack of talents?
Step Eighteen: Your friend deserves better, don’t they?
Step Nineteen: You are the problem, you must be.
Step Twenty: Hide yourself away, no one should want to talk to someone as awful and embarrassing as you. Push away your friends and family and wallow.
Step Twenty-One: Find someone who will keep trying to comfort you. Someone who wants to break down the walls that you’ve built up so high. Will you let them in? Let them see the cycle of pain that you are stuck in?
Step Twenty-Two: See step one and repeat.
Xenn, pronouns they/she, is a nineteen-year-old genderfluid college student majoring in Media & Communications. They love to write as a hobby and mostly write medieval fiction. This piece was completely impromptu and Xenn was feeling the creative spark from a professor's prompt in class. “A fictional poem/short story with some real things that have happened to you mixed in.” Xenn struggled with this prompt for a moment, not liking the non-fiction aspect added on, but quickly wrote this and their professor loved it. Xenn didn’t like this piece at first, but slowly fixed it up a bit and fell in love with the flow of it and was proud of it. Xenn is a sophomore in college and wants to grow as a writer at her time in college and wants to take as many creative writing classes as possible for their own enjoyment.
"The big girls" by quinn.anya is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
