Continued

The night out was pleasent but also decidedly average. A fun night, but not much more fun than I've come to expect since coming to Warwick.
Which is perhaps an indicator of my good luck in regards to parties, and perhaps also an indicator of how I am coming to develope an entitlement complex.
The music selection was mediocre: no Busted, no S Club, nothing I particularly feel invokes the 90s, and they closed with Fix You by Coldplay- a song i like very much when i'm hurting, but less so when i'm dancing and drunk: it is something of a buzz-kill.

And, having thus established I really am incapable of going five seconds without critiscizing something (a sad day for my ego), I can go back to my old topic: my tie. My tie, that i wore nearly every day between the ages of 13 to 16, because i owned only one.

My upper school tie, that was, above everything else, a symbol of My New Start: i was there when we brought the tie at a uniform sale, i carried it home, as we walked the same route i would walk many times to school once it started, and dreamed of the future. My fantasys of upper school life were limited and cliqued, as all my fantasys tend to be: i saw myself walking to and from with three or four other girls, all of us carrying bags and blazers, in late-autumn sunlight, with a general air of euphoria surrounding us. There were others, but it is this fantasy which stands out the most vivdly in my memory, perahps because it, more than any other, encapsulated so perfectly what it was i wanted, and i am even more surprised because i did not mould the fantasy in the form of a day dream: it sprung, fully formed, into my mind, as if my brain had processed all my individual desires into a single image. Even now, it is full technicolour, as bright as that first day i imagined it, and it still haunts my imagination 6 years on: the longing i felt for it stills feels fresh in my mind.

In my fantasy, all the girls were dark haired: identicle and indistinguishable, we were clones of one another. I can happily say that this part of the dream no longer appeals to me: i have moved in the opposite direction. I admire my friends for their uniqueness: with my cherry-red hair, purple daisy-chain tattoo and piercings, i stand out a little from the crowd myself. I adore all that it unique, different, special: anything, in short, that is not the same.

But the fantasy is 6 years old: 6 years ago, blending in with the crowd was but a cherished dream, and I was accustomed to standing out, sick of being different and hated for my difference. I wanted friends who looked like me-....No, what i really wanted was to BE LIKE THEM, because i could see nothing good about myself. WHy would i choose friends who were like me when i did not like myself? Much better to change who i was- and, accordingly, in my fantasy, our hair is uniformly shiney and wavey, our shoes and bags are carbon copies, our features morph to match each others, and how happy i was that even in my own fantasy, i could not tell which girl i was meant to be. It didn't matter: all that mattered was that i was one of them.

In my dream, we talked and laughed: i had had enough of silence. In my dream, i am in the middle of the conversation: i had had enough of listening to the conversations of others, so often about me, and being unable to interupt to defend myself, i had had enough of being ignored.
In my dream, we were simply walking, but in my mind, i knew we were walking home from school, because it was the walk home from school that was the longest, the most boring, the walk on which i most often longed for distraction. The walk home from school had also been the settings for some of the most painful confrontations, the cruelest attacks, the ones that were hardest to forget, the ones that haunted me long after they were over.

In my dream, our shoes and clothes and bags were identicle and indistinguishable but also conspicous in that all were expensive. I did not know at the time, nor do i know now, where i expected i would acquire these new possesions: there was no money left. I had not been given any such items on my last 13 birthdays and christmases and had no reason to expect that some would magically appear on my 14th birthday.
All I knew was that i was tired of being The Girl Who Didn't Have.
The item varied, but no matter whether it was Nike trainers, cute earrings, a lunchbox, a playstation, a furby: I never had whatever it was, and what made it worse was that i wanted these things SOLELY because people laughed when i didn't have them. Now i have my own money, i find that online games bore me after half a second, i can never be botherd to put my lunch in anything more than foil, Nike trainers make you look like a bit of a douche and i constantly lose earrings, cute or not (and my best friend recently confided in me that her fchristmas-present furby genuinly terrified her when she recieved one as a child).... and so it is probably unlikely i felt very differently when i was 10 or 11 or 12.
Nevertheless: my ideal was the sort of clone-style friendship i now regard with deep suspicion, and general mockery, and i understand why completly.

Until i was about 16, all signs of individuality were met with negative reinforcement- threats, jokes, ostracization, name calling, occaisional acts of physical....violence and abuse are overly dramatic words, so I'll just say that being repeatedly pinched, kicked and pushed, and having stuff thrown at you, over a period of time, pretty much destroys any natural impulse to be different.

After that, the things that were previously responded to negativly were suddenly met with enthusiasm: my new friends telling me how they loved my style, envying me for being 'so clever' or being 'such an individual'. Insignificant as it sounds, every compliment and show of affection was balm to the years that came before.

But these are things that i notice in hindsight: i paid little notice to them 6 years ago because there was a much bigger point to my fantasy, that shrunk every other detail in comparisome. In the fantasy, i had friends- good friends. In the fantasy, they liked me for who i was and felt as lucky to have me as i felt to have them. In my fantasy, i was happy...and for me at that time, being really, truly happy felt like a fantasy indeed.

I never realised my fantasy: it went, like so many others, unfullfilled, and, like so many others, it will probably never be fullfilled in my lifetime.

I am lucky that it was never fullfilled, though.
I will never be the girl i am in that fantasy, for several reasons.

I will never walk to or from school again, and when i did, my friends and i never looked like that.

My hair will never go back to being brown: i predict it will stay cherry-red for a good while longer before i change it again.

I cant afford shoes and bags like that (student debt, anyone?) and if i could, i wouldnt choose that style for myself anymore.

In fact the only part of the fantasy that still attracts me is its most basic premise: unconditional, unbound friendship, but it isnt something i fantasize about any more.

After all....why fantasize about something that i already have?