lost_at_sea ovenbird Fun fact: I played second violin in a youth orchestra for kids under the age of 19 for about five years. Less fun fact: I somehow managed to be bullied there. Every single kid in the orchestra gave up their Friday nights to rehearse. It should have been an absolute haven for nerdy artist types. And yet… When I was about eleven the orchestra took a year end trip to Cleveland. I was put in a hotel room with two other girls who quickly got busy making my life hell. The first night they wouldn’t sleep. They were jumping on my bed and talking about boys well after midnight. I was exhausted. I asked them to stop. Eventually I begged them to stop. They didn’t stop. So I went across the hall and got a parent who told them to go to sleep, but instead they spent the rest of the night wadding up wet balls of toilet paper and launching them at the ceiling above my bed so they would fall in soaked heaps into my sheets. The next day we went to Sea World. I was nauseous from not sleeping and not at all enjoying the company of my roommates, who were surprisingly energetic for people who were having a dance party in the bathroom at 3 a.m. the night before. At one point they said they were going to pop into a gift shop. They said they would be right back. They left me looking at a tank full of jellyfish and they didn’t return. When I realized I’d been abandoned I had a panic attack next to the sea lion habitat. I didn’t see anyone I recognized. I had no sense of how I would find my group. I cried enough tears for fish to swim in. I became water. One of the dads who was chaperoning the trip found me. That night I was moved to a different hotel room and I don’t have any memories at all of the rest of the trip. I can still see those two girls, long glossy hair, clothes way more stylish than my out of date hand-me-downs, laughing while clutching each others’ hands, disappearing behind a rack of plush whales, and then the crushing wave of my own loneliness and fear engulfing me. I dream that wave still: a recurring nightmare with a thousand foot high wall of water with a cruel glint at its core, looming thirty years later. I doubt they even remember me. You don’t generally remember the things you throw away. 260224 what's it to you? who go blather from