goldfluke

she sat there, watching her cousins trading stories, discussing their lives and wondered in her head, what she would have to say about her life which was mostly lived in her imagination with a few bites of reality: how would she explain the disinclination to engage, the reluctance to partake of the real?

suddenly through the reverie, she heard someone actually ask about her… she recoiled physically, looking blankly at the 4 peering faces, the weight of expectation sitting heavy on her puny frame. dumbstruck at the limelight, the balmy afternoon broken by the freeze enveloping her spine, silence choking her ability to think: no morsel came to hand; she had no fodder to chuck at them.

she had not yet learnt to buy time by repeating the question or how to deflect attention or to crack a wise one and ease the tension: so she sat there without hope of ever answering back, waiting for the pain of alienation to ebb, to let someone take the gauntlet offered to her. nothing happened, no one moved, till the cousin who had posed the question, turned away and declared her a wallflower.
thus, the damage was done: not having enough strength or wisdom to know otherwise, that is what she started believing of herself.