She

She. She has a name that some people call her, yes, but that isn’t who she really is. In truth, she is just the layers upon layers of panic balled up tight inside a smiling, cheerful form. She wants friends, and she succeeds in making them because she is stubborn and she refuses to fail. She attracts people to her like a magnet because people admire her cheerful attitude. People want to think that maybe if they’re around her enough she’ll start rubbing off on them and they’ll be happy the way she always seems to be.

She brings people close to her, and then she panics that they are too close and maybe they don’t like it and maybe it’s weird and maybe nobody loves her as much as she loves them. Maybe her love is just too big for any number of people to contain. Maybe her need for people to love her back is weird, maybe everyone’s secretly annoyed by how much she loves them.

She sends emails and text messages and when people don’t respond her mind becomes a frantic mass of screaming monsters telling her she shouldn’t have said what she said, because now everyone hates her, now she’s lost the only people who ever cared about her at all. The monsters grow softer but not silent, even when everyone eventually replies.

She cries about the friendships she’s sure she’s lost, and then she washes her face so that the people she still has won’t hate her. Because she’s sure that everyone would hate her if they knew that she cried. She tells herself that these are people she can count on to love her no matter what, and as soon as she thinks she’s convinced herself, something happens and she’s balled up on her bed crying since what if they hate her?

What. If. They. Hate. Her.

She locks herself up in a prison cell of shame for whatever crime she believes caused them to hate her. When she tries to remember the reason she speculates that this rypo might have made her seem careless, or that the Capital Letters might have made her seem too formal. She decides that she was too loving <3, but maybe she was also too… distant.

Inside her she can feel a part of her breaking, and she doesn’t know how to repair it.

So she doesn’t repair it.

She lets it break even further and when she finds out that nobody hates her, that everyone has a perfectly sensible explanation for not replying, she clumsily sews up the wounds. Each time they get even weaker and easier to reopen, instead of developing the firm, protective calluses she needs to form.

Write down your emotions, she’s been told. So she shakily takes out a pen and paper, and when she can’t even remember her own name she starts at the top of the page with the word “She.”