The dispossessed person found herself on the Floor of her university residence being liked by a sum total of zero people. Always having had friends, this initially struck her as some soon-to-be-rectified anomaly. She had always considered herself blessed with a natural charm. Warm, effervescent, likable, all of these adjectives had been employed at one time or another in descriptions of the dispossessed person.
She was not disliked. It was rather that no one took any kind of active interest in her. The wobbly-kneed entreaties of the dispossessed person were met with a confused silence far worse than disdain during the crucial first few days of residence life. She did not dare make callous reference to the victims of the recent national tragedy in the ironic fashion that her hometown friends adored her for. Maybe she was less savvy w/r/t current irony-sincerity matrixes than the cosmopolitan kids on her Floor1, or her clothes weren’t quite right, or something; she didn’t know. Maybe she simply missed home and projected a child-like vulnerability that did not jive with the struggle towards confident adulthood her fellow first-years were covertly, yet whole-heartedly engaged in.
During that first semester she would call the old friends she had recently parted with after the best summer of their lives2 in the dispossessed person’s small, geographically-isolated hometown. At first they shared long heartfelt conversations and jokey catchphrases that nearly brought tears to their eyes (i.e., to both the eyes of the dispossessed person and to the eyes of her old friends) and vows of sticking together forever and claims that no one would ever replace the dispossessed person in the hearts of the dispossessed person’s hometown friends and vice versa. But as time passed the dispossessed person became increasingly unnecessary to those friends as they made large numbers of new friends with more relevant catchphrases and more applicable charms applied to their current lives (i.e., to the current lives of her old friends). Now, very specifically, they were no longer really her friends, in that she could not communicate with them. Or when she did try to communicate with them it seemed to the dispossessed person like a desperate plea to rekindle what was lost and could not be rekindled.
On the rare occasion she would drink or engage socially with the people on her Floor, strictly from wall floral, just a vaguely-realized member of the crowd, she would become maudlin and try to talk about her former friends, insisting she’d been part of some immense, non-conveyable greatness. Sometimes others would claim their own past lives were imbued with an equal greatness, if not an even more distinguished greatness that was a cut above the recent past of the dispossessed person. But mostly she was politely ignored, because her Floor-mates had heard her pathetic spiel before.
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(A) For years this dweeb guy had held the attention of the dispossessed person and her two best friends in their homeroom class with grave and persistent advertisement of his “three secrets”. Secrets he would not possibly share, though the lone joy in his oft-tormented high school existence came from entertaining their many insulting guesses as to what the three secrets might be. In late August of what would come to be known to the dispossessed person as “the final summer,” confident his future exposure to them would be reduced in the extreme, he finally revealed that, (1) He had one lazy eye (which he’d kept secret out of bizarre fear that someone would cover his good eye, rendering him temporarily blind) and that, (2) His supposed father was actually his stepfather, and that (3) He practised meditation on a daily basis—and but given the dire tone with which he’d long promoted these secrets it seemed hilarious to “her girls” that the three secrets ended up being so minor-league in nature, with the possible exception of the lazy eye, so they burst out laughing, particularly at meditation, but after seeing the hurt in his eyes, they reassured him that they were only laughing because these secrets were no big deal; which was typical, as none of her old friends had malevolent or cynical natures really.(A1)
(A1) Their national-tragedy/grave-defilation humour was more a response to undue national hysteria as they then perceived it. ↩