When Writers Have Nothing To Say

Angelo Natividad
Aug 24, 2017 · 3 min read

The Pillar in the Commons

After Freshman Orientation, our groups split apart and everyone searched for their friends to catch up on things. I watched as everyone from my group scattered and disappeared, hanging out with their friends from middle school. I didn’t have any friends yet so I just stood in the middle of the commons just waiting for my mom to come get me. I would’ve sat down but all the seats on the bench were taken and everywhere I’d go I would just awkwardly sit too close to other people. So I just leaned up against a pillar for quite a while. Probably half an hour or so. I was not ready for high school. I was confident I would make new friends but once I started to see the kinds of kids that went to this school, I lost it all. I had no confidence in making new friends because of how different of a setting it was. Everyone around me was pretty much white. Sure there were kids of minority, but they seemed to have been raised in this neighborhood for so long that they are seen as one with everyone else. I didn’t feel welcomed at all.

I could be exaggerating but let me tell you about my first day of school. I went to my first class and I was the first to sit down. As time went by I watched more and more kids walk in and I was hoping that there would be one kid that looked like me that I can talk to. But no. Every single kid in that class was white. How about that kid in the red? Nope. He’s just really tan.

Back to freshman orientation; I was leaning up against this pillar when a kid came up to me with his dad and just simply introduced themselves. No smooth lead in like a joke or compliment about my shirt or whatever. He just came up to me, put his hand out and said hi. His dad did the same and that’s when I made my first friend. All that doubt in me about not being able to make friends didn’t go away completely because I still had trouble but that moment helped me realize that I’m not gonna be friends with everyone. I’m not gonna fit in with everyone and I’m definitely not gonna be like anyone. But there are people out there who will be able to see past my differences on the outside and find some similarities on the inside. There are gonna be people who won’t play into the stereotypes in my head and will be a good friend of mine. That kid and I never became close but we definitely weren’t enemies. He would still acknowledge me in the hallways and let me know about anything that I could possibly be interested at school.

Now it’s senior year and I’ve lost and gained so many friends. But to all those friends that I had or have, we became friends, not because of what we look like or even activities that we do. We were friends just for the sake of being friends. We enjoyed each other’s presence because we were all good people towards each other.

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