Too Late

“I want to see him,” she says. “I want him to notice me!”
He laughs and walks with his friends down the grey street, oblivious to the wistful girl watching him with a morose gaze. “I want him to be mine,” she says softly, her lips barely moving. She follows him from a distance, not too close, not too far. She is only curious on what type of person he may be.

At lunch the next day, she sits quietly at the table with her three friends, not saying much. She has her head down, her dark curtain of hair framing her face, giving her a little world of her own. She plays with her food unconsciously, the fork twisting in her hand. 
He sits about four tables down and across. He faces her, his back to the large windows that shows the outside world. He turns to his friends, chatting excitedly and laughing occasionally. But some days he sits alone at the end of the table, not saying anything to anyone unless they speak to him first.

“He doesn’t pay attention to me at all,” she says. Because no one does, enters her mind unwelcomely.
“Don’t worry,” her friend says, attention divided. “One day.” She drops the subject as soon as it comes. She always does.
“No,” she says quietly and disbelievingly. “Not at this rate, never.”

She sees him in the hallway during passing period. His locker is near hers, but that does not help her case one bit. She spends the time where she is supposed to be getting her books watching him, him not noticing, as usual. She likes to watch him move, but that was one of her many reasons that she was hopeless. Her mind and thoughts were those of a hermit in thirteenth century Israel.

She goes to her class, sitting in the very back when she can. She stares outside and into the woods, wondering what it was like to be free of troubles and emotions. She stares so long she does not realize everyone in the class was watching her.
“Huh?” she asks distractedly.
“Glad to see you are rejoining us, miss,” her teacher says. “How was your visit to Saturn?”
Everyone laughs. She feels her cheeks turning blood-red.
“Pay attention!” her teacher says sternly, then turning and resuming the lesson. 

When the school day ended, she rushes to her locker, shoving people out of the way, not caring that it was rude. She feels her eyes sting as she kicks the locker angrily. It opens on her third try.

She hurries to stuff her backpack with her books needed, then grabs her headphones and iPod.
She turns to see him. He was taking his ear-buds and playing a song on his phone. He does not do so much as glance at her.

She forces herself to look away. She pulls her backpack on her back and does her best to move through the throng of students in the hallway, pressing her thumb to the song she loves, Breakeven.
The song plays, giving her background music to her life and distracting her thoughts. 
At home, she sits in her room, door and windows open despite the fact she wanted to close herself off to the rest of the world. She turns on music and turns it up loud, getting lost in the beautiful lyrics of her favorite band.

She brings out her notebook and writes. She attempts to write her feelings and thoughts and emotions. But even she doesn’t understand herself.

“I’m such a failure,” she says, tears coming to her eyes, spotting her paper with dots.
“I can never do anything.”
But et she continues to write, feeling as if her life depended on writing, nothing else. She reads over what she has written. Even her words don’t sum up what she means to say.
Only part of it was recognized by herself, the rest was like Mandarin Chinese to her. 

When she wakes up the next morning, she realizes her notebook wasn’t there. It wasn’t where she left it the previous night.
“My song,” she whispers. “I don’t see it.” Her deep brown eyes widen. The window was open, she runs to the window and clutches the windowsill. Her notebook was out there, blowing across the cool grass in the pale light of dawn. She stares at it for a couple moments, then kicks open her door and runs down the stairs, almost tripping on the last step.

She sprints out the front door, not caring that it was early November and about thirty degrees out, and all she was wearing was pajamas. All that mattered to her was that she find her notebook as soon as possible.

Barefoot and across the solid icy pavement she runs. Her thoughts drift to him naturally, making her want to cry. Her feelings for him were way more than anyway thinks. Although she has rarely spoken to him, she fell hard. It was unavoidable when she develops feelings for a guy. She always gets her heart broken. It was the same result every time. But for this it was worse. Her feelings scared her. Their power was like nothing she has ever seen, and it controlled her like she was a dog and had a tight, unbearable leash on her. It was all written in lyrics and musical notes, contained in a meer notebook.

Her feet smacks against the grass. She had not noticed that she wasn’t chasing her notebook anymore. Her thoughts and feet had led her straight into the woods, and her feet were crunching against the old leaves, no light getting through the trees. She was lost and alone. But yet again, she was used to being lost and alone, even if she was in New York City on New Years Eve.

Later that day, her three friends find the black notebook lying on the grass, open to the page where her small, scripted handwriting was drawn across. 
“Where is she?” one says, hazel eyes wide with concern.
“I don’t know,” another answers, cocking her head to the right, trying to make sense of it.
The third picks up the notebook, scanning the page. “What a beautiful song, but I don’t understand what she is trying to say here.” The page was crumpled and tripped, some words missing from sight. 
“We need to find her immediately! She needs help. We haven’t been good friends. We should have been there for her when she needed us. We should have-” 
The second friends cuts her off, rubs her eyes, and says, “It’s too late. She’s lost. Gone. She is in the woods, for God’s sake! No one can help her but herself! She needs to find her own way out, and I believe she can. She’s not an idiot. She will find her way out, and she will be enlightened, a better version of the girl she had once been. It’s too late for us to act.”