Oooone more

At least, hopefully one more. Nineteen is my favorite number, and I just happened to post this on the nineteenth of June! This is another lengthy blog post that I'm quite proud of. The diction may seem slightly different; perhaps not. It also explains the story behind the enigmatic Silvia, which will come in handy for the next post I am due to deliver in the near future!

('Due to deliver' sounds related to pregnancy, hurhurhurhur okay I'm done
finished
kaput
blam)

[Posted Jun 19 2010, 03:00:05 PM]


"So I’m about to describe my ‘situation’ that’s far too complicated/confusing to be normal. Maybe it’s just the way I retell it, but a lot of it revolves around one person who indirectly changed me; whether it was for better or for worse, I honestly can’t tell. This person is female, and that fact becomes very important later on, but I know you guys are probably thinking about it already. I’m going to use real names for this, to make things easier~

Okay, so last year (when I was a stupid sophomore) I stepped into a cappella choir for the first time. Woo, I made it, not I could be with my friends who were already in it! Being in the lowest choir didn’t suit me anyway; I liked the color silver more than I did gold. I met some new people I had never seen before, and later Mrs. Kellert the choir teacher put us all in our groups. I was an alto, again, and there was this girl behind me with a really odd voice who was an alto too.

She started talking to me after she put us in the ‘mezzo soprano’ group for a few certain songs. She asked me about the book I was reading (Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett; I’m a big Pratchett fan) and we talked about that a little bit. Her smile was mesmerizing, and there was just something about her that I couldn’t put my finger on. She was really… mysterious—she also dressed a little differently from most people. I almost wondered if she foreign. Later I learned that her name was Silvia, and she did indeed live in Spain at one point, and she could indeed speak fluent Spanish. I was jealous, since I’m still learningSpanish, but I was a foolish little sophomore. I did other things I’m not fond of, including making fun of her voice.

Yes, my friends in a cappella choir didn’t like her. For one, since her voice was strong, Mrs. Kellert always paid attention to her.Everyone did. She always lifted her face when she sang, which is what people liked. A future judge for solo/ensemble contests came to observe our class, and she pointed Silvia out after we were doing singing a song (I remember which song it was, the name’s not important though):

Judge: You. What’s your name?
Her: Oh, Silvia.
Judge: Silvia, your face tells a story when you sing! I like that!
Me: … -deadfaced-

Obviously I was starting to feel a little overshadowed after this. From then on, Mrs. Kellert always paid more attention to Silvia and another girl named Hannah more than anyone else in the class—she even took me out of the mezzo soprano group and put me back into alto. Me. Just me. That really hurt, and I never forgot about how hurt I was when she did that. I tried doing everything that I could do to get more attention, but nothing. My voice was just too quiet. Now when the altos were all in altoland I always heard that sharp voice singing behind me, and my heart sank every time. She stopped talking to me. I should have tried talking to her more—this was my mistake. Now she wouldn’t talk to me anymore.

As the year progressed and I began to feel more and more inferior to every single other alto in the class, chamber choir auditions started up. Oh no, here we come! I think it would suffice to say that my sightreading was… a little more than terrible and obviously didn’t make it. I bet you can guess who did make it, too (I think I remember posting a thread about not making it here before and how upset I was about it :/).

Well, see, while my friends who also didn’t make it were rather irate, since I didn’t know how to feel anger properly, I did the other thing that I do quite often when things like this happen: I cried. I cried a lot. I cried so much, I tried to go out on a walk to calm myself down and it started raining on me. :| And not only did I cry, but I went into full-blown depression for a month. My friends, who thought I was just being a mopey emo bitch, began to avoid me. This was when I felt truly alone. I thought I lost my best friend Danielle, who’s been my support since I met her in eighth grade. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be as ‘outgoing’ as I was now. How was I supposed to go on without people? I need people, and now I began to realize just how bad my ‘people problem’ was. I think I’ll explain it: I have problems communicating with other people. If you’re outgoing or maybe I feel intimidated by you, it can be rather hard for me to strike a conversation with you. Basically, I don’t know how to act around certain people. Sometimes this problem even rears its ugly head in front of my friends; sometimes at night I will be sitting and I’ll feel… alone. I feel lonely all the time. I get attacks from it and I feel alone. It sounds weird but even I being an optimist by nature and a generally happy person all the time get those days where I’m just… useless, timid, and alone. In a room full of people like Silvia or Hannah or Ashley I’m rendered unable to act myself around them because I feel like they might think I’m odd, and I don’t know how else to act. I just sit and be quiet and hope maybe one of them talks to me so I can feel more comfortable and talk back. They never do talk to me, at least not usually. Sometimes, being in a room full of people like this really gets to my psyche. This year, I helped the chamber choir clean up for madrigal (trying to be useful to give myself a better chance of making it this year, and I did!) and not one of them would really talk to me beyond “oh, hi. Oh, nothing much. Thanks for helping out!”, including Silvia. In fact, I think the only exchange we had was:

Me: -moving a cafeteria table-
Her: Oh, let me take that.
Me: Okay, thanks.
Her: -no response-

It hurt a lot. I felt miserable. When my mom picked me up later that night, I cried. I cried so much. I didn’t know what they thought about me, and would I ever find out? All I wanted was for her to talk to me. Why wouldn’t she talk to me?

This year, I decided to join the speech team. I knew absolutely no one in the speech team besides Silvia, Ashley, and Hannah, all whom barely talked to me. Toward the end of the year, slightly defeated and working on the school newspaper, one of them talked to me (Gabby talked to me too, and even invited me to her graduation party, so things did get way better at the end of this year). Her name was Sara McDorman, and she was a senior graduating just like Silvia was. She was the one who kind of made sure I was more comfortable in the speech team; she made me feel more secure, and I really liked her. Since I was interested in doing prose (and her events were prose and poetry) she wanted me to continue doing it, since she and Allison both thought I could do rather well in reading dramatically. I thought so, too.

“Hey,” She said to me, “Do you want to know the truth?”

“What is it?” I responded, momentarily turning my attention away from the book review I was writing.

“Do you want to know why exactly I hang around other speech teams when we’re doing competitions?”

I knew where she was going at, since I did the same thing; for some reason, people from other schools tend to like me better than people from my school. This is another very important thing to know. I nodded my head in complete understanding.

“It’s because our speech team is just kind of snotty,” she replied, “I mean, they don’t seem to think about the fun of the team anymore. Now it’s just about who’s better than everyone else, and whose suits are fancier, and unimportant things like that. No offense to them, but they’re just really snooty and it’s okay if you don’t get along with them as well, because I couldn’t either (she’s really popular, mind you, so this part made me feel better). So like, don’t worry about those kinds of things. I really like you, and I hope you continue to be in speech team and have the most fun you can with it.”

“Sara, I’m going to miss you.”

I was really going to miss Silvia, too, but she never knew it. I heard her sing for solo/ensemble contests this year. Her voice was just so wonderful and I just… couldn’t… think of the words to describe how I felt at that moment when I heard her voice. I just couldn’t. The last real conversation I had with her involved another one of her friends, and we were selling bracelets for the Interact Club. I got to tell her that I thought she was a wonderful singer. And… this was it. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t be friends with her. I won’t say any more beyond the fact that I may… just may… have had a slight crush on her. I guess it just figures that I would crush on someone who I could never even be a little close to. Do you know how envious I was of Hannah every time she glomped her in the middle of advisory, or leaned her head onto her shoulder at the Orpheum Christmas concert?

Wednesday, May 26th was the last day the seniors were in school (over here, the seniors are let off earlier than everyone else for some reason). On this day, I had a breakdown. Well, to be honest, it wasn’t really because it was Senior’s Last Day at first, it was more due to my friend Heather being mad at me and me being under a lot of stress and my mom yelling at me and almost kicking me out of the house; but when I realized that fact it didn’t really help things. I began to feel weird before my second block class… and then I suddenly started shaking and broke out in tears. A few good friends dragged me out of the classroom, and I was rendered instable for half of the class. A math teacher (Mrs. Wilson, I think) offered to escort me to my counselor, which she did, and I told her everything, at least about my people problem. She seemed to understand, but it’s myclassmates that I want to understand it the most. But, out of everyone, I just wanted her to like me too…

My bewildered American Studies teachers had no idea what was going on, though my English teacher seemed to have more sympathy for me. My History teacher was just like, “oh. You missed half of class. Sit down.” To be honest, it was kind of funny, but I still felt instable for the rest of the week, and a little dizzy to add to that.

At this moment, Silvia’s in Barcelona having fun, and I’m still thinking about her.
I wish it would stop.

You want to know something else really ironic?
See, there’s this solo arietta that my friend sang for contests (oh btw the solo/ensemble contests were on my seventeenth birthday this year, and this was also probably the day I realized I just might have had a crush on Silvia; March 4th, 2010); it’s called ”se tu m’ami, se sospiri”. I was thinking about singing it next year since it’s like one of my favoritest songs ever, so I searched for a translation of it because it’s in Italian. This is what I got:

If you love me, if you sigh
Language: English

If you love me, if you sigh
Only for me, dear shepherd,
I am sorrowful for your sufferings;
yet I delight in your love.
But if you think that
I must in return love only you,
Little shepherd, you are subject
To deceiving yourself easily.

The beautiful purple rose
Will Silvia choose today;
With the excuse of its thorns,
Tomorrow, then, will she despise it.
But the advice of the men
I will not follow -
Just because the lily pleases me,
I do not have to despise the other flowers.

So yeah. I'm really ecstatic for next year. I will walk into chamber choir with my a cappella friends and maybe I will get more people to talk to me.

/end tl;dr"


(PS: I got a Division II (second place) on that solo I ended up singing, blagharghargh)