A new day. Nothing to write about. Is her life just wasting away before her? Is it sliding into a drab routine in which time ticks away but nothing seems to be taking place?

Yes, she did do some activities today. Soap attempted to make muffins, felt guilty for not attending church, but thanked God for helping her do extremely well on her midterms, played a losing game of Outburst, went to Sonic and munched on a sandwich, felt fat, typed a few medical papers that no one knew what the scrawls on the page meant for her grandmother, watch her mother grow agitated with her grandmother for complaining about a fossilized car, cleaned (!!), picked beautiful flowers for the dining table, finished a video that would put any director to tears, and was sucked into the state of guilt once again when her mother moved to an exercise video. And what was she doing? Sitting in front of a computer. If she kept this up, a few extra pounds would fall onto the scale. But she wasn’t fat! …And not America’s definition of “skinny” either. Just normal. Like her life. Normal. She was not the party type — God, no. Homecoming was a disaster, and the upcoming dance in February? She will not attend. No one could pay her to attend. Why put herself through the torture?                                                                    Why should she:

1) Rush through every store that has open doors to find an expensive dress that she will only wear once in her lifetime.

2)In addition to the dress, hunt through every rack that holds a shoe to find a pair that hardly fits, but buy it anyway because it’s the perfect color, even though it goes with nothing else that hangs in her closet. But maybe she should get her money’s worth out of it after she nearly faints when she sees the price tag.

3)Get all dressed up in her once-in-a-lifetime dress and painful shoes for what, a few hours?

4)Attend the dance dateless because guys seem to slink away from her. Why? Only God knows. No, she was not…. horrifying? Some boys appeared to like her, but whatever.

5)Try to dance. Correction: not dance. Soap cannot dance, and she will never learn how to dance. She doesn’t feel comfortable swaying to music that she doesn’t listen to, so why do it?

6)Scuttle off into the shadows away from the dance floor and try to tell herself that she’s having a blast while gripping a cup filled with punch, alone. Wait. Her school dances don’t even serve punch. 

7)Wait miserably for the slow hours to drag by. And by… Until the dance is finally over and she is free to rush home and do whatever she pleases, like things that really matter in life. Like food. Food matters. And comfy socks and books, along with her computer to write. Writing matters. Dancing, however does not.

To her, of course. She knows that most people love dances. Why? They can keep that strange reason to themselves.