LEFT OUT
Prompt - Left Out : Write about a time when you've felt left out or you've noticed someone else feeling as if they didn't belong
"Hi Mark, wanna go to a party tonight?"
It took me a few seconds to come up with reply to this surprising question. I only knew Dave from sociology tutorials. We'd never had many conversations, and then only about the classes and essays, so this sudden invitation shouted 'ulterior motive'. And I had always had a fear of parties, reinforced by my experiences at almost every one I'd every been to. As a child there had been occasional invitations to classmates' birthday parties, which my mother insisted on me attending, in the forlorn hope that they would lead to me making a friend. I hated them. She even tried to hold one for me, but had to abandon the idea when it quickly emerged that nobody was going to come, which I was relieved about. Then there were he xmas parties for the families of factory workers where my father put in his time. They were a little better, as most of us didn't know anyone else so they weren't already in little cliques. But that didn't stop me being left out on my own most of the time. I simply didn't possess the sociability gene.
As a teenager I got used to being on my own most of the time, happy to remain on the outside. Only when I went on to uni did I think about the possibility that maybe I could find myself a niche, somewhere I fitted in. We came from all over, we were on our own, and, surely, somewhere in this morass of spotty humanity there had to be somebody who was a bit like me? Plus I had yet to go out with a girl and I wasn't totally hideous, was I?
So I made an effort to talk to people, to try and sound interested and interesting, to mix and be 'one of them'. I found myself in a group, albeit on the fringe, and got invited along to parties in flats. And I'd go, full of hope, only to leave drunk and alone having spent most of the evening stood up in the hallway, avoiding eye contact and wishing somebody would simply take pity. They never did.
Until one night in a part of town I'd never been to before. There had been a couple of conversations with girls earlier, but they had both drifted away, and the night looked like ending as it always did. I was trying to figure out the best route to walk back to halls when one of those girls, the blonde, stopped in front of me, coat in hand.
"Are you coming?"
"What?" Not the most intelligent of replies, but I had given up by then.
"Back with us. We're going back to the flat." I looked round to see the girl she'd said was her flatmate walking towards the door with a guy all over. I remembered blondie mentioned they had come in the other's van. I didn't remember her name.
"Um. OK." More because I couldn't think what else to say.
And so I found myself in the back of a van with a girl I hardly knew, but who quickly made it obvious that she wanted to know me better. Exhilaration and terror in equal parts. Despite which it went well enough that she suggested we meet again. It only took six weeks for her to become bored with me, but she did enough to pump a little air into my deflated balloon of optimism and I now went to parties looking for something to happen.
That had been over a year ago, and nothing had. I reclaimed my wallflower status, the balloon collapsed, and parties, any social gatherings, became no go areas, off limits to my fragile ego. All this formed the background to my response to the decidedly eager Dave, my immediate reaction being an unchangeable No. Well, no thanks, it's very kind but I'm busy. I still didn't have the confidence needed for straight rejections.
Dave was persistent. And explained his motives. There was a girl he was going to get off with, he knew he would, but her friend might be a problem, and the friend was nice and she'd like me and it would be a great night, wouldn't it? I queried how many others he'd asked before coming to me. I think it was his crestfallen honesty - seven - that made me take pity on him. And if there was a girl involved then maybe this was the night my fortunes changed again.
So we went to the party, miles from halls, and he was right, she was really keen on him. And he was wrong, because her pal gave up on my after five minutes and was last seen under a long haired caftan wearer. While I found my familiar spot in the hall, an obstacle to be got round. By twelve thirty I'd had enough and left, pissed, broke, and a long walk in the drizzle ahead of me.
Were there classes I could take in how to say No?
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Mark stopped typing, happy with how it had gone. He probably shouldn't use his own name, but he could sort that out when he went through for an edit. It felt like one of his better efforts so far. He'd been enjoying the Creative Writing course he'd been doing, but 'Left Out' had been the first prompt they'd had that had chimed immediately with his own experiences. The story was both about him, the him of forty seven years before, and also not, for he'd changed enough of the facts to be able to justify it as fiction. This would be the first one he'd feel comfortable reading out loud.
He thought about those years, and how he'd changed since. One thing hadn't altered - his dislike for parties. The class was hard enough, but at least there was someone making them all feel included. But random social gatherings? Shudderingly awful.
He'd found someone who'd marry him, eventually, and had grabbed the opportunity before it slid away. Without, he soon realised, fully explaining his fraternisation phobias. The big wedding, his new spouse's insistence on a reception that went on and on and on, his sense of loneliness on very day he got married, hinted at an uncertain future. It lasted little more than two years, her frustrations at his non-gregarious nature and running critique on his inability to have 'fun' a swif r route to the stop off point.
He accepted his life alone, avoided office xmas outings and birthday celebrations, accepted his 'hermit' nickname. Over the forty years he was there he developed into an object of affectionate contempt to his coworkers, their very own misanthrope.
Now he was going to use that past. The miseries and humiliations of childhood, school, uni, work, marriage would all become fuel to his keyboard dancing fingers. He felt he'd found his niche.
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