An Extrovert With Social Anxiety

My breath catches in my throat as I make eye contact, yet not with my crush, no it's with a random average looking stranger as I walk down the hallway alone.

The prospect of being alone in a crowd or alone in general so loomingly terrifying. The mere thought of stranger eyes watching my every move and judging the way I breathe or smile invokes inescapable horror and petrification.

Yet here I sit, alone. At a lunch table in the quad, my 'friends' all inside, warm and happy.

But still, here I sit, raindrops falling onto my computer keys that soak into my half-frozen fingers as I type, my jeans slowly soaking up the cold and water.

Something as simple and juvenile as them filling up the seats at the lunch table so I'm at the end with the wannabes made it hard for me to breath, my eyes filling with liquid though I don't personally feel sad or wronged.

My brain shut off as I try to smile to the girl across from me who everyone shuns for her annoying laugh and constant self-deprivation. The girl next to me launching into a rant about orchestra that my ears shut out, my brain spinning in circles, trying to go back to its normal extroverted function.

The only solution my turned around brain can come up with is to grab my bag and blue lunch pail and run.

I plopped into the seat like a tired bird on its home perch. I can finally breathe again, sweet oxygen filling my lungs and calming my twitching heart and shaking hands.

One girl stands and with a smirk flips her hair and sits back down, the rain streaming down the glass making her appear as though she is crying the tears that pour down my face with those of the sky.

She just did it again, all of my friends giggle and laugh at me, their laughs ringing in my ear though I can't hear anything besides the gears grinding in my brain. My breath hitches again and I can feel my heart galloping like horses fresh out of the racing gates.

I must seem pretty strange on the outside I suppose, a hulking log of a girl bowing to tiny twig-like Queen Bees with their little shoulders, short statures and mean but submissive tendencies.

How awfully peculiar it must be to see a lumberingly clumsy girl in her maroon rain jacket, her long fingers moving nimbly and frantically across the keys of her water dotted computer, her jeans 3 shades darker as they soak in rain and tears, with not even a shiver wracking her body, but great heaving breathes gulping in oxygen that doesn't seem to be doing its job.

How very very peculiar I suppose, how fantastically peculiar.