White Lenses

She's the awkward friend, the one with big eyes and a careful smile. She's the friend you invite to your birthday party but she'd never be chosen for a metaphorical deserted island.

She stands quietly to the side while everyone else talks and laughs, occasionally offering her input but knowing that if she worked up the courage to speak no one would hear, not really.

She's the friend you cry to when you think your heart is breaking but never the one you hit up on a Friday night. She carries secrets deep and cold, carries them to the grave because a promise is a promise and you shouldn't make them if you don't plan to keep them.

Things aren't black and white, she learns this many times over as decisions are made and words are spoken that aren't fully good or bad, more of a moral gray. No, once a white lense nothing can ever be white again, only gray. Both good and bad.

She will quickly learn that morally gray characters are more relatable; its easier to fall for the imperfect side character because no one likes to be reminded of how imperfect they are. No one likes it but we all need it.

She's the quiet girl in the corner, you know her name and her favorite animal but nothing about who she really is. You don't know why her eyes are always sad or why she always wears the same black bracelet, you know her laugh but you don't know her whispers. She will never let anyone know, not easily, because trust is a fragile thing and like a white lense it is not easily repaired.

Paper and pen will quickly become home because with paper and pen, you can create whatever you want and the paper will never know different. Whatever you choose to write is your own, just you and the words flooding your head and escaping your fingertips like trapped animals. She will discover that villains aren't black and white, either, nobody is born a villain. The change has to happen somewhere in between. Villains are easy to write and create, often more so than the heroes because heroes have a standard, but you can do any small thing and be deemed a villain by somebody. She likes villains because there is a layer of complexity there, even if the original creator didn't intend it. A layer of pity and hurt and old despair that makes it easier for her to understand them - easier for her to understand the people around her, too.

Her fingers always move; they twist her ring or trace her fingernail or brush the scar on her arm, the one she stares at when she thinks about intention.

She is the innocent friend, or so it seems of the outside. Maybe she only seems innocent because she knows that if she opened her mouth and said what she really thought and knew, she would offend everyone.

Either that or she is the sarcastic friend, the one who is older than everyone else, the one who makes jokes no one else understands - but once again she doesn't say what she really thinks because she doesn't want to be alone.

She's the "I'm sorry" friend.

She's the "If you're sure" friend.

She's the "Its ok, maybe next time" friend.

She doesn't like physical contact but even more then that she doesn't like talking, at least about herself anyways. Talking is dangerous. Talking makes her feel vulnerable and weak, even when she knows she's not. Its ok to share your feelings, everyone has them, but isn't it also OK to deal with them yourself?

As I said, trust is a fragile thing - but not flower fragile, bomb fragile. Make one wrong move and it blows up in your face and nothing is the same ever again. She learns that the best way to avoid blowing up is to keep to herself, be just dependent enough to seem normal but never show anyone what really matters, because she will learn that when she does that she cries. She doesn't like crying, it makes her feel vulnerable and weak, just like talking.

An ant can carry ten to fifty times its own weight.

Well, she thinks, if an ant an do it, so can I.

So she does, she carries it all, all her own scars and aches and screams as well as everyone else's. She listens to everything they have to say and doesn't complain, just does what she can to help. She acknowledges her own problems just enough that they aren't neglected but no more, no more because she knows that if she let herself stop and feel them she would drown.

You see the way she bites her lip when she thinks, her hair falling in front of her eyes and her chin tilting towards the ceiling. You see how she coils her energy like a cat waiting to pounce, or a deer preparing to flee - you are never sure which.

When you are sitting alone, you sometimes get the very unsettling feeling of being watched. Prey gets that feeling too, she explains to a friend, so don't stare directly at the thing you are stalking - stare slightly down and to the side, enough that you can see it but it can't feel you. She never thought that life would take the same approach to her.

Once upon a time she was eight, meeting new friends that would become close enough to be cousins, at least for a while.

Eight years old meant juice pouches and swing sets and blanket forts, it meant life's greatest problems were not getting the ideal car seat on the way home.

And then she was ten, and there were more new friends - these ones would shape her life in ways she couldn't have imagined, in both good ways and bad. Ten years old was grape vines and bare feet and bunnies, three step dodgeball and scooters.

Suddenly she was thirteen and she thought she had her circle of friends all set. Thirteen was Mike N Ike's, calls at 9:30 and paper butterflies. Problems were annoying brothers and missing a homeschool hike - if only she had savored those more thoroughly, because they wouldn't last.

All the sudden she was fifteen. Fifteen was a good number, right? Solid and dependable. That was what eight-years-old had thought, fifteen was practically a grown up. She could drive!

Turns out driving was more complicated than she thought it would be, just like 9:30 calls and new friends.

Fifteen turned out to mean books and T-shirts and jokes she finally understood. It meant Friday walks and memes, writing stories and taking pictures while she could.

She didn't much like fifteen, but like most things it had to happen eventually.

You don't know where she lives because she never talks about it, only giving vague answers and quickly changing the subject. She is shamelessly weird around some people and shamefully normal around others - don't try and figure it out because you never will, you will only brush a tender spot and get attacked by a porcupine.

You will never figure her out, not fully, because she will never open herself fully to you. There will always be secrets, always be holes, but there will also always be a fierce and burning love for the few she chooses to give it to. A passion and a rage that tears her apart whenever she feels that someone she loves is hurting and she can't do anything about it.

She can't open herself and yet anyone who shows her simple human kindness earns her undying loyalty forever; she gives her mind out freely but can't give make herself give her heart for fear of someone dropping it.

Maybe you have a friend like this. Maybe you are the friend like this.

I'll tell you now: it can get worse, and it might. But once you've hit rock bottom, there's nowhere to go but up.

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

- Stephen Hawking