Hello, Stranger

To protect the girl in my story's privacy, I will not be including her name. Enjoy the story anyway. :)



Last Thursday I was sitting alone at a table outside of my school's food court when a girl that I'd never met came up to me. She looked at me and said, "May I sit down?" I said, "Of course" and was immediately delighted. Things like this don't normally happen to me.

I am naturally a shy person and meeting people is really hard and uncomfortable for me. However, even though she had expressed that she wanted to sit by me, I immediately became anxious. I wasn't sure if she just wanted a space to sit or if she actually wanted to converse. Then I was pressed with the question of whether or not I should initiate some small talk because I didn't want it to be awkward and yet, I didn't want to annoy her. I over-think things a lot and this is a perfect example, I think.

Imagine my relief when she immediately starts up a conversation and we end up talking for about an hour. After that, we both had to go to class and once again, I was pleasantly surprised when she asked me if I'd like to meet again for lunch on Tuesday, which is today.

I was really looking forward to meeting her again today but was nervous that she would either forget about it or that she was just being polite last week. There I went, over-thinking again. So when she showed up today, all bubbly and happy, I knew that I had to start giving people more credit and be a little more comfortable with other people.

She seems to have a bit more of an extroverted personality than I do, which is fine because it helps bring me out of my shell a little bit and I'm really grateful. When I met my best friends from high school, I sat down with them randomly at lunch, too and they ended up being some of the best friends of my life. It's just so ironic that it ended up happening to me and this time, I was much more afraid. I remember being petrified in high school when I met my friends but I did it and ended up being so thankful that I did, just as I am thankful that this girl did it for me. I look forward to continuing our lunch dates together as the semester progresses and continues.

If you have any life experiences that make you happy or that you'd like to share, comment below! Also, feel free to check out my other social media profiles!

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Blog Challenge, Day 18: A Childhood Memory

So today's challenge is to talk about a memory that we can remember very clearly. I am going to be honest, since most of my readers are people that I know, I don't like to give out their personal information or stories about them. Basically, that means that a lot of the stories that I want to tell, I don't feel comfortable telling. So instead, I'll tell a story about someone that I have not spoken to or seen in years and I'll do the best that I can.

By now, you should know that I don't have very many friends. I'm very shy, introverted and selective in my friends and in any aspect of my social life. So elementary school was really challenging for me. But in the third grade, I met a girl named Courtney who changed everything. I know that I mentioned in a previous blog that my best friend for most of my life was a boy that I met in the third grade but that was at the end of the year. These events all happened before I met him.

Courtney moved into my neighborhood not long after school started. As you can probably guess, I didn't have many friends and when she moved in, I was really excited. Then I found out that we were in the same class and it got even better. We bonded instantly and for the first time, I was going over to another girl's house, swimming, going to skating rinks, going out to lunch with her family, having sleepovers, etc. I finally had someone to bond to and really felt like I knew what it was like to have a best friend.

Courtney was a girl that came from a divorced family. Being a very sheltered child who lived with both of her parents, I didn't understand what divorce meant. But she lived with her father and stepmother and towards the end of the school year, they split up. I'm not sure why but Courtney and her father soon moved away, as well as her stepmother. It was heartbreaking to say goodbye to someone that I really felt that I needed and connected with. She was the only kid that I had met so far that accepted my personality and understood me because she was so much like me.

It was the first time that I had ever really experienced the loss of a friend. A friend of mine had moved away in kindergarten but I didn't remember him, so I don't count that experience. Courtney and I decided that she was going to write me when she got to her new home and we would be pen pals. Unfortunately, we only exchanged a few letters before we truly grew apart and got on with our lives and we were never able to visit each other. Luckily, I met my new best friend a few weeks later and we had a really steady, long friendship all the way through high school, so I guess it worked out okay.

Sometimes I wonder how different my life would've been if we had been able to stay friends but I can't dwell on what might have been. I was young, impressionable and not having Courtney seemed like the end of the world at the time. But I couldn't control everything and I had to let her go but hey... it sounds like life to me.