A Drop In The Ocean

She hadn’t changed. At least she didn’t think she had. She looked at herself in the mirror and thought Why do I feel fatter? I still fit into the same clothes… Her skin looked darker, the blemishes more obvious. She wondered if she ought to have noticed her collar bones and whether they were as they should be. She undid her hair and ran her fingers through it, changing the parting; to see if that made a difference. Did she stand out as beautiful? Or ugly? Did she stand out at all?

She heard words she didn’t understand all around her. It was a strange kind of incomprehension. It was a language she understood, but one she couldn’t always translate into meaning. Many questions unanswered, she nodded through so many conversations, it seemed. She mused over how insignificant those pieces of paper had turned out to be – after she carefully and proudly filed them away.

Her world seemed smaller than it used to somehow. In the midst of a sea of differently coloured faces, hers seemed less spectacular. The world was so large, experiences of people like her so many in number, that she had watched, mesmerised, as her life changed from being stand-alone; the only one she knew; to merely another…example.

She isn’t special. She’s ordinary. And so are most people. And like them, she fights mediocrity, futile a fight though it may be.