The Virgin Suicides: Is hell really a teenage girl?

 Based on Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 novel and adapted for the screen in Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides still stands as the epitome of Girlhood. Five teenage sisters living in a small American town, their lives tinted with love, control, silence, and pain. Coppola’s cinematographic talent shows through—as in all her films—in the aesthetics: an atmosphere so delicate, so unmistakably hers, that you almost forget the horror underneath. It’s disturbing how a story about death is presented in pastel colors and ribbons. The same visual scheme appears in much of her work, including Priscilla.

And yet, how is it that a movie so intrinsically feminine is built entirely through the male gaze?

The lives of the Lisbon sisters are narrated through the lens of their teenage neighbors, boys who feel an insatiable attraction toward the mysterious girls and romanticize the very horror unfolding in front of them. We know nothing about the sisters except what others choose to tell us. Even Cecilia’s suicide—one of the film’s first scenes—is explained by neighbors, doctors, and the boys. No one asks Cecilia why she did it. Not really. The entire movie is built through stories, fragments, assumptions. Every glimpse of their minds is through their diaries, through the words heard from them. We never truly know what was in their minds. And we never will.

In the end we had pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained. Oddly shaped emptiness mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name. What lingered after them was not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts. A clock ticking on the wall, a room dim at noon, the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. - Narrator.

Isn’t that exactly how society sees teenage girls? Isn’t this the most accurate representation of girlhood—not because it captures what being a girl is, but because it captures how girlhood is perceived? Our existence filtered, softened, aestheticized, misunderstood. Always seen through someone else’s lens.

Is pain and beauty all people can see in teenage girls?

Is a beautiful hell all society sees when they look a 13-year-old in the eyes? Is sadness, and virginity, and softness, and rage… really all we can expect to feel? Is there really no passion? No happiness? No sensuality? No hope? Are we really just a bunch of pain and pink ribbons? Is our suffering really so different from any other’s, or is it just different? Are we really so hard to understand, or is society making no effort to understand us at all?

Girlhood can be painful. Girlhood can be soft. Girlhood can be rage and virginity and mystery. But we are not only that. We aren’t only the fire they need to try and save. We aren’t solely an enigma for boys to solve. We feel as intense as anyone else. We have the same lungs and hearts and we bleed the same. But they don’t know that. They don’t wanna know that. They want to think we’re heaven, and when they see the truth, hell is the only thing they can call us.

Group projects: blessing or nightmare?

You might think: "oh great, I got a group project asigned with some of my best friends!" Well, I don't think that thought has ever crossed my mind. Group projects might be the worst nightmare I could ever put myself in. Maybe you love them, their easy, fun, simple; but they could appear in my personal house of horrors. 

So yeah, to get on mood for the incoming spooky season, I'm going to talk about something we've all gone through: Group Projects. 

You might have been asigned a group, or maybe you pick to be with your best friends, maybe it's an easy presentation or a complicated essay. It doesn't matter, it's all hell in my eyes. I just never had a good experience with group projects. See, when I work on my own, I can figure out a way to include pink on my biology diagram, but when I'm surrounded by people, I can't just add whatever I want. I can't put glitter or cute fonts. I have to ask. And yeah, I ask. I'm not the kind of people that goes around and does everyhting without asking. Those people suck. So I ask, and they usually either dismiss or ignore my suggestions. So my group projects often end up looking like a big corporation threw up on them. All info, no imagination. 

I've been wrongly called a controlling and bossy person all my life. Usually by friends outside school and my family, but when it comes to class, I leave all my bossiness out and try to put my best working face. I'm not there to start a war, I just want to finish and go home, you know? So, all through middle school and high school, my creativity was limited into nothing. That's why I used social media to escape. I used fonts and colors, and I let my inner graphic designer shine. Those were the only moments where I could be me. Group projects were just a small part me, but those pictures in my intragram, those edits on tiktok, this blog. That is me. Full on me. 

And I know, I know, that the font and color that Karen chose is more profesional. I know for an essay I can't actually use the fonts I want. I know I can't add pop culture references. I know. But I kinda wish we could. How come it's okay for a project's background to be baby blue, but the second it's baby pink, it stops being professional? How come it's perfectly okay to cite Aristotle but not Stevie Nicks? I consider Stevie Nicks to be the epitome of my philosophy. I should be allowed to add her. I should be allowed to put glitter, because adding sparkles doesn't make my essay any worse, does it? 

"I wanna love glitter, and also stand up for the double standards that exist in our society. I wanna wear pink, and tell you how I feel about politics. I don't think those things have to cancel each other out" - Miss Taylor Swift

(The Taylor quote was intentional, I know she haunts a lot of people's nightmares, so I decided to add her in case some hater wanted a jump scare)

See, I was in some class this morning, and we had to create this portfolio in groups to add all of our essays and investigations in ther. The teacher gave us complete creative freedom. Oh, how I love creative freedom. I was about to start pitching out ideas when I see one of my friends pull out this black and white corporative Canva template. First of all, a template??? I would've made the portfolio from scratch if they didn't want to waste any time, but okay, I can stand it if it's cute.

Except it wasn't cute. Nope. Not at all. 

I wanted to scream right there. I might've. I don't actually remember anything else but staring at the black Times New Roman letter float around my screen. "This is so profesional," I hear this one girl I'll call Karen for the sake of her privacy. "This will get us a perfect score," she smiles, as she adds the first image google gives us and the most bland and formal text ever.

I swear I would never waste creative freedom like that. But what could I do? My suggestions were being ignored for being too "unserious", too "girly", too me. But I bet you've never heard something be called "too manly to be used on a serious project", right?

Anyway, that's why I hate group projects. 

So wish me luck for next semester because I have a lot of black and white Canva's templates waiting for me... 

That's all for now,

happy october girls!

What changes when you turn 18?

18 is a big age. A big scary age. You stop being a kid. That's scary. For the first time in my whole life I'm not a kid anymore, and I'm not sure if I feel like it. I mean, I'm still the same person I was yesterday, am I not? I still feel little and vulnerable. 18 is way too young to be an adult. You're still a teenager for god's sake. There's just something so dreadful about your whole life changing in a day. Think about it, one second you're protected by society, and as soon as the clock hits midnight, you're left on your own. On my own.

Am I really on my own now? I don't feel mature enough to be on my own. I am, really, the same girl I was yesterday when I wasn't allowed to vote. What has changed in a single day that made everyone so sure I'm an adult now? Why is it that everyone has the same time to reach to maturity. I'm not mature. I just wanna keep going home after class, ask my dad for help when I need to sign up for anything and see the look of pity everyone gives me when I tell them I'm underage. Like it was okay for me not to know something if I was 17 but all that comprehension went away the second I turn 18. And what happens to hanging out? Am I supposed to keep asking my parents for permission or am I old enough to decide? 

Why is that everything has to change in one single day?

Well I've been afraid of changing

Cuz I built my life around you

But time makes you bolder

Even children get older

And I'm getting older too.

Why We're Still Getting The Rachel in 2026

 I like to think that a good hair comes with a great responsability. Great hair can absolutelly upgrade your look, and having frizzy or dull looking hair can destroy your whole outfit.

Yesterday I went to the hairsalon, as I like to do once every three months, and I got what a lot of people call the Rachel. As for all of you guys who don't know what The Rachel is, I may show you a brief explanation. The name for this haircut comes from the great show that it is Friends, where one of the main characters' hair stole the spotlight. The character was, in fact, called Rachel Green, and during the 90s, her style was a revolution. Layers, layers and more layers. Everyone was going to their hairdresser and telling them to get the Rachel haircut. No picture was needed, every good hairstylist knew what it meant. Even though Jennifer Anniston, Rachel actress, changed her hair every season, there were common points that could be considered the pillars of this great look. 

Rachel Green appeared on the first episode of friends as a lost girl who had just run off her wedding and had gone to New York to find confort on her old best friend, Monica, played by Courtney Cox. Rachel character goes from an inexperienced and spoiled girl, to a succesful woman on the fashion industry. She's funny, confident but also sweet and emotional, providing looks that are still relevant nowadays. Surely, her most distintic feature was her hair. Raging from brunette to a honey color, it was always styled with a lot of layers. I consider The Rachel to be a hairstyle with a length that could go from shoulders to tits, with sort of a butterfly cut to frame the face and always straight.  

So that's what I got yesterday at the hair salon. What I like to call the most flattering and chic haircut a brunnete girl could ever get. I mean, I'm not saying that any other style is ugly, this is just the one I like the most. When I left the salon, I stopped by target, bought some of my favorite makeup products and walked home with a fresh haircut, painted nails, two paper bags and feeling like a 90s diva. So yeah, my week couldv'e been shit, but so was Rachel's and if she could do it, maybe I can too. 

The art of a good Instagram picture

 We've all been there. Iconic outfit, unmatched hair, makeup like never before and such a perfect spot, it would be a pity leaving without a good picture. So you hand your friend, partner, sibling... your phone, trusting they'll take a photo worth of your expectations.

And when they finally hand the phone back you see it, and you want to die inside. They took only three pictures, terrible lighting and even worse framing. Nothing like the pictures you showed them from instagram. And they look so proud: "You look great" they say, and you can't just tell them they're horrible photographers, so you turn your phone off and delete everything when you get home. Another cute place and you have no picutres to show off on instagram.

It had happened to me more times that I can count. I was yesterday on one of my friend's birthday, and on our way to the restaurant, we found this super cute spot on our campus. It was golden hour, you know, and we looked absolutely great, as we had put on formal clothes for the party. I was wearing this long vintage black dress, V neck and my hair up in a clean bun. I looked amazing. So I took pictures of all my friends. They all looked amazing. We were all so dressed up and looked so cute, I couldn't help it. So I started spamming pictures of each one of them. One by one, pairs, trios, a selfie... Pictures so good, three of them used them as profile pictures after it. 

And then the time for my own pictures came. I wish I could've taken my own. I wish there was a way of being on the picture and behind the camera at the same time. First of all, the framing was terrible. Tilted pictures, messy composition and instead of taking burst photos, my good friend H decided it'd be a good idea to just take a couple of great ones. Spoiler, none of them turned out great. 

At first it started out good. I told her how to put the phone and I positioned myself on the sweet spot. Not too far, not too close, cute background, golden light hitting my face just right. I started posing but after the first one she stopped and told me it'd be better if I moved. She positioned me against the light for the photo. She said my face looked terrible with the golden light on my face, said it made me too pale. I was a bit unsure but I followed her instructions. She took them on her phone. We all insisted on doing it on hers because she has the latest iphone, and her camera is the best of them all. Anyway, as we were busy later having dinner at this super cute sushi restaurant and then going to this club, I didn't ask for the pictures. And I should've, because the lighting and framing disaster went on for the rest of the night and while the other girls got amazing instagrams posts, I had nothing and ended up just posting a group selfie story. 

So how did I end up like that?
I had it all, right? Hair, dress, makeup... I even wore my new kitten heels that make me look great! This shouldn't have happened. 

Well, I should tell you girls, as a photographer expert, I ought to show you know, a couple of tips so you know how to take the perfect pinterest pic (or teach your friends how to do it) so what happened to me last night, never happens to any of you. 

#1 CRIME: Lighting. 

Light is the most important element of your pictures. It doesn't matter how good your posture is or how pretty the background looks if the lighting is bad. It's the thing that makes a photo either pinterest worthy or straight to the trash folder.

The best times of the day to take pictures are during the morning or sunset. First hours light has that bright but soft look that makes everysingle one look efforlessly cool. And golden hour is just THE lighting. We all deserve a cool golden hour picture. A really good one can make you look like an absolute godess and I swear you'll want to use it everywhere. 

And girls, I know seeing yourself with a pale face due to lighting can make you doubt yourself but I swear DO NOT STEP OUT OF THE LIGHT. Let the sun hit your face, let it bring up your natural beauty. Make sure you're facing where the light is coming from, either it is daylight or a flash. If you think it's too bright, you can always bring it down on your phone while taking pictures, but please trust the process. You want your whole body to glow, to be the main character. It doesn't quite matter if the background stays a bit dark because, girl, you are it. This is your picture, not your background's picture. 

If, by any matter, you want to be facing back the light, either because you want to show something or because you want the sky to be visible, make sure your face doesn't look too dark. You don't want to be in the shadow. For that, you can use your camera flash or a direct light. Adjust it until you look your best and it doesn't look too noticeable. 

#2 CRIME: Framing. 

Framing might be the next most important thing. You don't want your photo to come out looking funny just because your friend positioned you on the corner of the camera. Like, c'mon. I know the sunset behind me is beautiful, but I don't want my arm to be off frame, right? 

Either you want your pictures to be on horizontal or vertical, you'll want to activate the grid on your camera. This was a game changer for me. You can use the grid for the rule of thirds, and to keep your lines straight, keep the shot from looking messy. For a portrait you may wanna try to position the person's eyes on the higher line, making it look much more balanced. You can also use the grid to place yourself or other elements on the centre, or to create more composed photographs. 

I know, I know this isn't exactly a crime. Photography is an art, it's something you can change and modify and if you someday see that not following the grid is making the picture look perfect, then do it. My list isn't a book o rules you must follow, but some tips to make your next instagram post stand out. But you also must be brave and dare to try new things if you think it'd be cool. Just make sure you don't crop anything important out and please PLEASE don't tilt your phone too much. 

I know this part is a little bit hard to understand, but it's all about practice and taking pictures and pictures until one feels just right. I'll put here an example but feel free to ask if you have any questions. 

#3 CRIME: Not using photo burst. 

I promise you this is the ultimate photography tip. My pictures have been unmatched since I started activating photobursting. I know just spaming the camera button feels the same, but it's nowhere close.

Photo bursting is ideal for us girlies. You can just start making poses and you won't fear a bad picture anymore because it's impossible to have one if you've taken a thousand. 

On my latest trip to Paris, I started using this method and I swear I've never had better pictures. It took half the time to have way better pictures. I could just move around and my friend would capture that efforlessly cool candid picture we all dream of.

I promise girls, photo bursting is the secret pinterest girls have been hiding from us. You don't even have to know how to pose right, the camera will do the work for you. 

#4 CRIME: Not checking the pics. 

DO NOT FEEL BAD ABOUT ASKING TO REPEAT PICTURES. I swear, no girl I know will feel bad if you ask to check the pictures and then ask to repeat them. I wouldn't feel bad. You don't like how you look? That's okay! Let's change that. 

So don't make my mistake, don't assume your pictures look good just because you imagined they did. Check, see the mistakes, try to avoid them. Take your time to find the perfect picture and it'll all be worthy.  

#5 CRIME: Details.

Okay, okay, this isn't quite the crime, but just a tip I have to share with you because I used it on my last photo dump and it changed EVERYTHING. I used to get just likes or hearts and this made me get so much compliments.

Don't forget to picture details too. You don't want your whole instagram feed to be just you and huge things. Say you're going to Paris. You don't want all your pictures to be: Eiffel Tower, you, Louvre, you, Disneyland, you. Everyone has pictures like those, and yeah, they're cool, don't stop making them just because everyone takes them too. But don't forget to picture small beautiful details too. The floor on the street, a beautiful table, food, grass, flowers, a detail of an important monument no one stops to look at. Those are the little things that make your photo dump lived in instead of just a regular travel post. 

Also, small tip for when you're taking those photos. Point at the thing you want to take a picture of and then click on ×2 zoom. Not 1.75 or 2.25. Just ×2. The quality is better than other zoom positions and it'll make your pictures look cuter. 

Those pictures can also be things like the sky or a detail of your outfit. Please, I'm begging you, it'll make your life feel like an pinterest board. 

And I think that's about it, girls. I hope you enjoyed it and can now apply my tips to your wonderful pictures, I'm sure you'll all look like absolute godesses. Love ya, Auds.

Should I text him?

 I'm alone in my room.

First weekend after classes started and my phone burns inside my pocket.

I'm watching "Sex and The City" on my laptop and wishing I could just get on my kitten heels and mid-size skirt and march downtown like Carrie Bradshaw. I'm wishing I could just meet someone, hand them my number and act so casual about it, maybe take them to some pub I'm not allowed in yet, maybe go dinner with a big fur coat and aply lipstick on the bathroom while he waits for me on the table. Wishing I could call my girls up and go out for coffee and talk and talk about boys and jobs and money and makeup. 

Instead it's a saturday night and I'm watching Carrie falling for the biggest asshole for the fifth time. I started this because of her, because of Carrie. She always seemed to solve her problems after writting about them, and I thought to myself, if she can get over Big after just writting an article, maybe I can get over all my issues by writting too.

But I can't write for a huge newspaper or magazine, like Carrie did. I can't even write with my real name, because how will people react if they find out it's me behind the computer?

People say you have half the solution after writting about it, so here we go.

I met him two years ago. We went to this camp that lasted one month, and the second I saw him I knew he was it for me. Tall, brunette and kind. What else could my 15 year old self ask for. I think it was my first crush. My real one. I caught myself staring at him like an idiot and turning my head when I felt his eyes look back into mine. He was nice and smart and could chat for hours about stuff I didn't understand a word of. And I would listen.

He was only a year and a half older than me, so while I was 15, he was 17. He felt so old back then. And now that I'm 1 myself I can't help but think of him as a kid too. We were on the same camp group. Team yellow. They made us wear this yellow bracelets to know which team we were in and I found myself looking at it with longing eyes as if having matching bracelets made us soulmates of some kind. I wasn't even that close to him. Not during our first week, at least. Then our saturday trip came and I was seated next to him on the bus. That's when we got close. We all got close during that bus trip, actually. I became best friends with the girl I was just friends with and talked to people I've never imagined myself talking to.

He was such a nerd. I'm not even exagerating. I mean, I know I'm kind of a nerd, but he was on the next level. That might have made my crush grow, to be honest. There's just something so precious about seeing someone care so much about something you don't understand. If I see someone like the same things I do, I can't help but see it as some kind of competition: who's the biggest fan? But he was just so into space, and I knew so little about it. He spent the whole ride explaining basic stuff to me and I think my pupils might have dilated to the point where there was only black on my eyes. 

We didn't become intimate. I was too nervous to become too close to him. I think I hid it pretty well, though, because for the next three weeks, no one said a word about it. I would tease him to hide the growing ache in my heart, and my head would keep count of how many days were left until my chance was over. 

Two days and I'll never see him again.

One day and I'll never see him again. 

I didn't have instagram back then, just Snapchat, which he had admitted, did not use, so my chances of keeping this relationship working were zero. We shared one last hug goodbye and got into my parent's car, and as I drove away from camp, I would replay every interaction in my head and wonder why I couldn't have had my summer romance. Why everyone could live their dreams but me. I could feel my heart pounding and my gut shrinking with dissapointment. I cursed my stupid parents for not letting me have instagram until I was 16 and cursed him for not using Snapchat. 

I had his number. I had the number of every camper I had talked to. I had them written on the back of my shirt with black sharpie, small hearts and signatures decorating the white fabric. I texted some of the girlfriends I made, before quickly realizing they were showing less emotion than I was and quickly stopping. By october, I had stopped talking to all of those kids I had once though of as best friends, and each passing month, the though of him would only get heavier on my contact list. 

I didn't made an instagram account the day I turnt 16. It felt embarrasing to admit that I had been waiting desperately to make it because my parents wouldn't let me. So I lied and told everyone I just didn't want it, and created it only after a couple of weeks had passed. 

You might know: 

Him. 

That was one of the first follow suggestions I've got. Him. My boy. My crush. I ignored it and quickly closed the app. It'd be weird to follow him now. A few months had passed and we hadn't talked since that last hug under the warm july sun. I had tried following some other girls from camp, but none of them had accepted my request, why would he. I would be just humiliating myself. So I let it go. 

On January 2025, I found the last scrap of him left on my bedroom. Half a year and there it was. His name written on the tag of that Bon Jovi shirt. His shirt hidden on the back of my closet. His shirt hidden behind all of the camp stuff I tried to hide as to not make my surrow bigger. A shirt I had completely forgotten about. A shirt of a boy who I hadn't spoken to in almost a year. 

"You should text him about it." Said my good friend, H, who, even though she had no idea about my feelings, thought him and I would make a pretty good couple. "That way you can start talking to him again."

I felt stupid. I grabbed the shirt back from the closet and pulled out my phone. I took a picture and sent it before I could even think twice. I even forgot to add something after. No hi, no hey this is yours, no hey im from camp, you forgot this. Just a burry picture of an old shirt. 

"Who are you? I think you got mistaken, sorry." It was his answer. I wanted to cry my eyes out. He had really forgotten about me. I took a deep breath.

"It's me, Auds, from camp last year. I found this shirt, I think it's yours."

"Oh yeah shit sorry, I just hadn't saved your number"

We talked for exactly two days, until the usual "catching up" questions ended and I didn't know what else to say. I knew he was coming back to camp one last summer, I knew I wasn't, I knew he was interested enough to keep answering and asking questions back, but I also knew he wasn't interested enough to keep the conversation going when I stopped being the first one to talk.

It's been incredibly painful to be reading those texts now, a year and a half later, but it was necesary to remember it as it was. It started awkward. Of course it did. It started by him not remembering who I was.7

"Who are you? I think you got mistaken, sorry." 

Those are the words no woman want to see after texting the boy he likes, am I right? But I let my insecurities aside and thought to myself, if I want this to happen, if I want to keep in touch with him, I can't just let it slide. So I kept texting. He teased me. God I think I could feel my heart stopping when he teased me. It was all back. That fuzzy feeling on my chest, that dumb smile. 

But looking back at those texts, I had no fuzzy feeling keeping me from seeing how short that was, how long were my texts and how short were his. He was nice, of course he was, nice and funny and he not once left me on delivered. He took little time to answer every single one of my messages, and promised to write me after he came back from camp later that year, to tell me how it had gone, and after joking about how it would never be as cool as our year was, we stopped talking.

Just like that. No ghosting, no fight, no real reason to be as heartbroken as I was. 

On July 2025, a year after camp, I though I was over it. Over the memories of that summer, over the friendships that had ignored me, over the happiness I had felt, over how included I was and how invisible I felt after. Over him. 

That's when I saw him. It was one quick glance. We don't live far away. His house is just two towns away and he had told me he sometimes came to a lake near mine. But I hadn't believed it was true. I had forgotten that one day, he had been real. That it all had been real. 

I was on the lake with some friends when I saw him. Same dark hair, damp curls falling over his forehead, and those same yearning eyes. I wanted to die. He looked so good, and I was still the same kid with messy hair and an oversized vintage shirt over my bikini. I didn't tell my friends that was the boy who had broke my heart without even realizing, without it being his fault. I didn't tell them, I spent the whole afternoon trying to get him to be the one to take the first step because I was afraid if I did it, I would find out he had forgotten all about me. 

He didn't even see me. I don't blame him. The lake was packed, and my friends and I spent half the time on my parent's lake house instead of the beach. He wouldn't have had the chance to notice me, but something inside me wanted him to feel it. For him to sense that I was close. To see me. To see me so I could see him and smile and go back to being that crushing 15 year old. 

I didn't see him again until this week. I was at some college party I didn't want to attend but ended up loving, cute tank top, cuter pants, and with my mind very far away from him. His name hadn't crossed my mind on the last couple of months and neither had that longing feeling on my heart. I was fine. I was over it. 

Or so I thought. I was next to the speaker, pepsi can on my hand and other arm wrapped around my best friend H. And I saw him. Long curly hair, yearning eyes, same silly smirk, arm around another girl's shoulders.

And then his image dissapeared. It hadn't been him. It had never been him. When I turned around, the guy with the girl wasn't my boy. His face was similar but not quite the same. Same dark curls, same dark eyes but not my boy. I don't even know what happened. It seemed so real. For that second, I had thought it was him standing in front of me. I had thought it was him locking eyes with me. I had believed it and my heart had felt that subtle and heavy pain again. I had believed it was him and I had let myself be reminded of how in love I was before forgetting. My friend, of course, was so confused as why I was so emotional all of the sudden. I brushed it off and took a sip of my drink to wash those thoughts away.

I knew it hadn't been phisically him. I knew his arm wasn't the one around the girl, and those eyes staring into mine weren't the ones I had once thought would be my future. But the feeling was the same. My reaction was the same as if it had been him. Does it really matter if what you saw was real if the pain in your body is real?

I felt so stupid. The second I got to my dorm, I took off all of my clothes and threw myself in bed. It was late. Like stupidly late for me to still be worrying about it. I grabbed my phone and openned instagram. 

People you might know:

Him

And because the adrenaline in my veins was very much real, I decided to click that dangerous blue button under his profile picture. I closed my phone and wished I wasn't so desperate. I wasn't so humiliating. I wasn't such an idiot. It's been two years, I thought, if my camp friends didn't accept my follow request after only a couple of months of not talking, he's not going either. He's probably forgotten all about me, and will leave my follow request without answering until it's the last one standing on his notifications box.

I was so sure.

Follow request accepted.

X follows you back.

I want to throw up.

So what now? It's been a couple of days since he follows me and since his posting is nonexisting and when he saw one of my stories he decided to ignore it, I don't know what's the next step. I've proven I'm not forgotten on the back of his mind, he has seen my profile and known it was me. He accepted my request at 8 am the morning after I sent it, so he must have not thought much about it. But still, he keeps being a follower more instead of someone I talk to, just like he was someone on my contact list or someone on the lake one afternoon. It's like I'm forced to step back and keep a safe distance. Like I can see him and maybe say hi and follow each other, but when I try interacting there's some force of the universe keeping me away.

So what would you do, girls, would you text him?

Afraid of not making friends on your first day of College?

 I was terrified. I felt this gut-wreching feeling in my stomach and I know everything about me was wrong. I hated my outfit the moment I stepped out the door and I couldn't find a single reason why people would like to be my friend. 

I started college last week. I don't have a roomate, and neither did I go to the same classes as any of my friends, so, even if I could see them around campus, I was nowhere near them most of the time. The morning classes started I knew something was wrong. I put on this cute baby blue top with jeans, and white converse. My hair was curly and tied back with a scrunchie. I carried a cute tote bag I felt embarrased of when I saw other girls were already carrying purses. I felt stupid. Everyone was so prepared, so old, so cool. I was soo uncool. 

When I got to my first class, I sat alone in middle row because I figured it would be the best place to make friends. Not too at the back, not at the front like a teacher's pet. I sat there, put down my tote bag and pulled out my phone. I was 15 minutes early. I saw people walking in and out, seats being taken and the empty space beside me only felt loniner.

I should've seated next to someone. I thought. Be the one to start the conversation. I shouldn't wait for someone to do it for me. 

Making friends is about taking firsts steps. It's awkward at first, I know. But someone has to do it. Someone has to get up, sit down beside another person and talk about anything. That's how friendships get made. 

You may thing, oh I'll probably bother them if I sit with them, or maybe, oh they already have friends, I shouldn't get with them. We always expect other to be terrible, cruel, mean, even. But this is college. People come here to make friends, meet people, create memories. Most aren't even interested in their degree. And think about it, how many times has a new person sat beside you and you've thought, oh, how annoying. Your answer is probably never. 

If there's a problem in isolation nowadays isn't because people refuse to get along with other students, but because they're scared to be the one to take that big scary first step. That step that feels like you might fall down from the highest building ever, like you're taking off your clothes and taking to them naked. That step that might feel like the most humiliating ever. 

The bravest step.

I should've been the one to take that first step. I was so convinced on doing it, it should've been me. But it wasn't. Just as I was about to turn around and talk to the girl behind me, I was aproached by two others who looked as lost as me. 

And, let me tell you, they were the nicest people ever.

For the sake of their privacy, I'll just call them M and Z if I talk about them on later posts. Well, they only know each other from being classmates, so they weren't that close either. The good thing about making one friend in college is that one friend can connect you to a hundred more.

More specifically, Z and M introduced me to ten new girls that, although they didn't turn out to be as close as my girls, were quite nice and aproachable. We all passed around our instagrams, because only a few in the group knew each other, and started chatting about how lost we were.

I didn't reach the end of my morning with ten new friends. Nowhere near that. That would be inhumane and I admire whoever who can achieve that. But I did end up my morning having lunch with M and thinking that maybe, maybe, college isn't so bad afterall.