Annelisa

My days always go by the same way. I get up, get dressed, eat, brush my teeth, put on my coat, leave the house, and take the bus that drops me off at my school. When I get there, I don’t talk to anyone, move from class to class until lunchtime. After lunch, more classes, bus, and home again. An endlessly boring routine.

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I spend nearly all of my free time reading. It’s really the only activity I enjoy. It’s the only moment of the day when I can escape my monotonous daily life, and forget my parents who never pay attention to me, my older brother who hardly ever leaves his room anymore, and the fact that I don’t have a single friend at school. Whenever I read, I can immerse myself in completely different universes, integrate another world and finally be happy. Well, temporarily.

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I spend my evenings and my nights reading almost nonstop, in my bed, until I fall asleep snuggled up against my book, or with my face planted between its pages. Most of my few hours of sleep usually took place on the bus, sometimes even in class. Yeah, I’m not really the most exemplary student. It’s my brother who’s always occupied that role in our little family. When Erik was my age, he was my parent’s pride and joy, as well as the token nerd of his high school, which was now mine. He has long suffered the consequence of being top of his class: psychological torture on the daily, resulting from the toxic jealousy of his peers in our overly competitive school. While I was still in elementary school, I had told myself that I would never meet the same fate. Upon entering high school, my twelve-year-old self decided to make sure of this by never talking to anyone there at all. After all, if they didn’t know me, they couldn’t hurt me, no matter what; or so I thought at the time. In my first year of high school, whenever I felt the urge to interact with a classmate, or raise my hand in class, I remembered Erik's sobbing, the soundtrack of my late-night reading during his last years in high school. Starting from seventh grade, I became the guardian and the prisoner of my cage of solitude, where I was protected from the rest of the world.

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I guess my way of thinking could seem a bit over-the-top. Self-inflicted isolation like that isn’t something any kid would do, normally. Personally, I can’t say whether I regret my decision to cut myself off from the rest of the world in that way. Mostly because I just don’t know how my life would be now, if it had been different. Even if I wanted to, I can’t undo my anti-social status at this point in time. Whenever I even try to talk to my classmates briefly, even if it’s just to ask for the due date of an assignment or whatnot, they overreact. They somehow just can’t believe that I have the capacity to talk and make a huge deal out of it to their stupid friends. It pisses me off. With that kind of response, I don’t feel like even trying to reconnect with the rest of society.

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Until recently, all my days were identical, until I received my first smartphone for my fourteenth birthday. Everyone in my grade already has one, since last year. I always see them constantly staring at their screens, in the halls and in class. They constantly talk about Instagram, Snapchat, and Tik Tok. I’ve never understood their obsession with social media, and have no interest in using my new device to find out what the hype was all about. I’ve never wanted to connect with others in real life, so why start doing it online?