After school I run a couple errands to kill time, but eventually my car gets low on gas and since I don’t feel like spending any more money I choose to save the precious gallons left in my tank for my trip to school tomorrow and proceed to return yet again to my large suburban home. I am the only person home and I will continue to be the only person home for the next three hours.
No parents, no siblings, no human contact. This little window of opportunity might seem like a blessing to some teenagers, an uninterrupted chance to get high or hang out with friends or have some quiet homework time--but being alone in my house makes me feel awkward and depressed so I spend an hour or two shuffling around in the kitchen stuffing my face with whatever I find to pass the time.
I can never bring myself to do homework or study or create art or read or even exert my mind in the slightest way. So, in a lame attempt to not feel totally useless I take a noble step and do what I feel is logical as I try to counter the gorge fest I just had with some cardiovascular activity.

I choose to go running.

I can’t really run. I don’t have the perseverance or stamina or will power or any positive qualities that are usually associated with good runners. I, on the other hand, am extremely lazy and I give up easily at the slightest hint of difficulty or discomfort. I am a weak person.
But it’s five in the afternoon and I feel like the world is ending and my house is a sauna and I am overweight and alone and bored and so I leave.

I start slowly and awkwardly out of my cul-de-sac and up a hill, my thighs flapping together and my shorts clinging to my skin and riding up my crotch--making me uncomfortable and self-conscious. I try to focus only on my body and its rhythm but all I can think about is the discomfort and what I must look like. Then, as the self-pity train starts chugging along I begin to mull over the other very important aspects of my life like just exactly how pathetic it is and how much I don’t enjoy being around my parents and how disagreeing and seemingly distant my friends are and how I don’t really like anyone at all and how I do need to be with other people, but whenever it happens I’d so much rather just be alone again.
I also consider the possibility that I am actually a loser and a bad person and so maybe that is why no one takes interest in me and I am not where I want to be in life right now. Then I reassess the situation and realize that I actually don’t have a clue where I want to be in life right now, and that all I know is that it most certainly is not where I am at the moment, running alone up a large hill with too-tight exercise shorts, a bottle of water and a sweaty ipod.

As the incline becomes more intense, I try hard to remember my elementary and middle school days and how amiable I was and how easy I found making friends to be and how much I didn’t mind being single and alone, but I quickly realize that its not true at all and that for the majority of my middle school experience I had a best friend who I shared an unusually close and codependent relationship with. Maybe this long relationship, which never really ended, made me socially retarded since we had basically prevented a friendship void by making certain that we were together 24/7 and that there really wasn’t any room for outsiders. I also had an early bedtime in middle school.

Maybe it’s because I never got proper friend-making training, maybe it’s because I am lazy and never tried hard to get good grades in school, maybe it’s because I know that I wont be getting an ivy league education and become a doctor or a lawyer or a six figure making office drone like my parents and everyone else around me, maybe it’s because I am overweight, maybe it’s because my mom always messes up my self confidence and makes me feel bad about myself because “if she won’t, who will?” Maybe it’s because these stupid issues matter so much to me since I am 16 years old and I can practically feel the hormones raging inside as I slowly make my way around another corner and toward a downhill street does the thought even cross my mind.

End. Life. Now.

Do it. It’s not that hard. Jump in front of the next car that comes. I mean, statistically, there’s a good chance I’ll probably get into a fatal accident in the near future anyway. Why wait it out? What’s the point of a few more years of suffering? I don’t believe in God. I don’t have anyone to love me.
Holy s**** I am more pathetic than I ever thought possible.