{"id":517,"date":"2020-07-19T13:40:15","date_gmt":"2020-07-19T13:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/?p=517"},"modified":"2020-07-19T13:40:21","modified_gmt":"2020-07-19T13:40:21","slug":"solipsism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/solipsism\/517\/","title":{"rendered":"Solipsism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I was in the school library one day, reading a dog-eared book on Isaac Newton when I happened to notice that a girl sitting at a nearby table had taken a shine to me. I could tell because I spotted her reflection by way of the window and couldn\u2019t fail to note her dreamy eyes, chewed lip, and the bashfulness stamped across her face. No other way of looking at it, someone was infatuated with me<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was odd, because A, this girl, (tall, ginger, with a bit of a chin) usually shot me a look of complete disdain whenever we encountered each other, which I suppose in retrospect was a defence mechanism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And B, Jesus, why would anyone take a shine to me? The school had made it perfectly plain that I was at the bottom of the heap, shoved into a pigeonhole marked \u201cSpaz\u201d which the higher-ups gladly pissed into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Let me explain, I was given a telling off (if that\u2019s the right phrase) by Toby Forbes. He was captain of the football team, often landed the leading role in the school plays, and had a battalion of blushing girls lining up to talk to him. By any measure, he was top of the school\u2019s hierarchy and therefore held the same authority as a teacher, so he had offered me this sage advice: \u201cChrist, you\u2019re ugly, you\u2019re weird and everyone\u2019s laughing at you, just act normal, you fucking tosser.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Girls and boys are far from perfect, shove them together in that hormonally charged jungle called secondary school and it\u2019s more or less a disaster. Many a time a giggling girl came up to me and said, \u201cI fancy you, wanna go out?\u201d when I\u2019d reply in the affirmative, she\u2019d laugh and say, \u201cOnly joking!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the lesson learnt was that I was undesirable, pathetic, and deserved to be alone. Okay, I could accept that, but now all of a sudden, one girl had a thing for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, sure I could ask her out and know what romance was like, but the truth was I hated this twist. It felt as if Fate cruel and unusual as it is, wouldn\u2019t even let me enjoy celibacy in peace and had mockingly thrown this love-struck girl my way as a means of letting me know that I didn\u2019t call the shots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Naturally, I was having none of that, so I spun around and asked the girl, loudly as possible if she could please stop staring at me. This grabbed the attention of almost everyone in the room and caused a gaggle of kids by a neighbouring table to burst into titters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Humiliated the girl fled the library in tears, and I, satisfied that I had refused to play the dignity-stricken ritual called flirting, returned to my book. I\u2019m sorry to say nothing else happened. Next time I encounter her, she shot me a look of disdain which I could tell wasn\u2019t acting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was in the school library one day, reading a dog-eared book on Isaac Newton when I happened to notice that a girl sitting at a nearby table had taken a shine to me. I could tell because I spotted her reflection by way of the window and couldn\u2019t fail to note her dreamy eyes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10158782359051062_103813597863211":"","twitter_1225722811282530305_1225722811282530305":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"A new story from SWANSEA WRITERS \"Solipsism\"\n#writerscommunity #writers #fiction","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[121,258],"tags":[273,274,272,275,271],"class_list":["post-517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-121","category-july-2020-first-love","tag-geek","tag-library","tag-redhair","tag-rejection","tag-solipsism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbrNJE-8l","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":522,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions\/522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swanseawriterscircle.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}