Snippets

I lived in a castle in the air and beyond the moat surrounding it, was a world I had read of and heard about in books and on television. There was the other world too, the non fictional world of stark reality, and I thought I had done my homework before I stepped into it.
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It’s complicated- this discussion on the "worlds".

My mother used the topic as a deterrent.
You haven’t seen the real world- she’d say.

I won’t lie, that statement scared me a little. I had seen evil women in soap operas, single limbed people on the BBC-news channel and more heartbreaks than I would have liked in a single lifetime, and yet, there was a world out there, the “real” world that was unimaginably cruel and well hidden from young, convent educated girls.


* * *

I did not like the girls in school and I thought I was above them- mentally, physically and choice in musically. Psychoanalysts would say that this sense of superiority was a farce, that the on the inside I felt too scared to go up to these people and make conversation because then they’d know…

Know what? - me. I was scared that all these people might just have seen the real world that I hadn’t and that they would balk at my ignorance; that they might not like me, even with my pseudo-intellectual Ayn Rand obsession. I was a pretentious snob and if they spoke to me, they might just know it.
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Girls can get so annoying!

I’m not pretty- ***** told me confidentially during PT, when we were pretending to have gotten our period to get out of playing kho-kho. She really wasn’t. But you couldn’t just say that.
Why would you say that? - I cried in mock astonished tone. - Of course you are. You’re great, really.
I maintained the air of vagueness, not specifying what the greatness was in reference to.
I’m really not! - She cried- But its okay, I’ve made my peace with it.

Clearly she hadn’t. I wanted to shake her and tell her that it didn’t effin’ matter what one looked like, that there were other things that were more important, that we would all be old and wrinkly one day with the only thing to our credit being what we were on the inside, but I was sixteen. I was battling insecurities of my own and I really thought that whatever the real world was meant to be, it wouldn’t be so pretty for the ugly people. . .

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