She walked along the city street, in a sea of strangers, on a cloudy day.  Thunder crashed violently overhead, but she didn’t flinch.  In fact, she barely even noticed.

She was always disconnected from the people around her, never really belonging in any place or situation.  Maybe it was the way she viewed the world, or just the way the world viewed her.  Most of her existence was unnoticed and insignificant.  She was easily forgettable, which she tried to see as an advantage, but it didn’t feel like one.  All around her, people laughed and connected, but she always stood on the sidelines, just outside of the action, watching it unfold but never participating in even the slightest sense of the term.  She watched, and wished that she could find her place, but eventually realized there was no place for her here.

A stranger bumped into her without so much as an ‘excuse me’, and for the millionth time that day she wondered if she existed at all.  People often looked through her, and she worried that she had in fact died but not realized it yet, and that nobody could see her because she no longer existed.  She felt truly invisible, and the emptiness inside was so deep and so dark that even a black hole itself could be overtaken in the vacuum of nothingness that resided within her soul.

It’s not that she didn’t want to connect.  It’s that something inside of her, woven into the very core of her being, couldn’t connect.  She was one to ask, but never to be asked.  She was one to care, but never to be cared about.  She was one to listen, but never to be heard.  She was called mysterious, but she wasn’t mysterious at all.  She was practically screaming, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know!”  But that’s the thing.  No one really wanted to know anything about her.  She worried what people thought of her, but eventually came to understand that nobody thought of her at all.  She had so much to share, but nothing to offer.

Sometimes she hated herself.  She knew she was a broken-down mess of a soul. She just wished the others couldn’t see it so well.  If she could have cried, she would have.  But the emptiness ran so deep that she no longer felt sadness.  Just an overwhelming numbness overtaking her very essence, what made her who she was.  She felt nothing.  She was nothing.

She’d never been popular, and she pretended it was by her choice, but she knew that wasn’t the reason.  It was because no matter how hard she tried to connect, she just couldn’t.  Nobody really cared, not the way she did.  And in the end, maybe that was her own fault.  Caring too deeply and thinking too much.  This kind of existence could torture a soul.

It had been raining, but she barely noticed.  Even though her hair was dripping, raindrops hung off her lashes and her clothes clung tightly to her cold body, she barely felt it, had barely felt anything in so long she’d almost forgotten how to feel at all.

She stopped in her tracks, on the city sidewalk and looked up into the dark, gray skies.  The ice-cold rain slammed across her face, invoking a numbness upon her skin that matched the numbness inside her soul.

Maybe she wasn’t meant for this world.  Or maybe it was her purpose to walk across the Earth like a ghost.  Unnoticed, ignored and easily forgotten.  To be looked at, but never truly seen.  To be listened to, but never truly heard. To be there, but never to belong.

She closed her eyes against the onslaught of lightning, and as everyone else ducked for cover she held out her arms and prayed Grimm would come for her.  But in order for death to take her, she would first have had to live, and she never quite made it that far.  She rarely felt anything anymore, just went through the motions in a world that was too bright to notice her insignificant, dim light.

She would never belong to this place, to these people.  She would never be enough for this place, for these people.  Her quiet voice would never be heard among the shrieking of the others, and anymore, she wasn’t sure she wanted to belong here anyway.

She put one foot in front of the other, water filling her shoes and sending a chill straight to her tired bones.  If she felt anything at all she would’ve shivered.  But she didn’t feel anything now, and she didn’t shiver.

She turned down a dark alley, the grayness and rain obscuring the view of her silhouette as it disappeared around the corner, and just like that…she was gone and forgotten.

The hustle of the city street forged ahead, and nobody missed a beat.  One was left to wonder…did she ever truly exist at all?

 

 

 

 

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