How it started (And Where I am)

I want to say I was suicidal before it was cool and sexually active before it was sex. But that wouldn't really explain how I came to feel so Other. Besides, most people who aspire to write think it's all good and whatnot to be outside - to feel like an observer- to drink it all in... and then spew it all out with insights and poetic turns of phrase. Writers are forever singing the praises of eavesdropping, as if being near a conversation trumped all need to actually participate, as if sitting at a table alone were some how a badge of honor. And maybe it is, when it's by choice. Which brings me back to suicide: one is not lonely if one CHOOSES to be alone. Of course, danglers aren't any less dead. But then, every analogy has its short-comings.
Anyway, it's not what you think. I didn't sit alone in a cafe. My town, back in high school, didn't actually really have a cafe. And if I'd gone, I'd have had company. I was a good student, liked ("but not Well Liked, Dad..."), and a good athlete. Awards came. Individual members of groups befriended me in a kind of high school cool outreach program kind of way. There was nothing particularly abhorrent about me. I was an easy fixer-upper. But I wasn't clique material. I was neither the girl you dated, not the girl you took home to mother. I was a girl you said you knew, and thought was yeah, nice.
Except, I wasn't nice.
There's a funky store front in this town I once lived in, that's painted salmon pink. As you approach, the building looks super funky. Victorian trashy. You can't wait to go in. But first, you walk by. And when you do, you notice that the windows are higher than the roof of the building behind. That the building behind is just a brick cube. A health insurance building. A chunk. Nothing.
I hate facades. I hated them then, too. So I hated me.