my friends left me out

The two of them were together.

That feeling started up. I knew what it meant: the spiral. I thought about how alone I felt, and the idea kept coming back—maybe I should just never see them again.

I wondered who else might be there. Maybe it was the other group of girls. Or maybe it really was just the two of them, not including me. I couldn’t know. My brain just decided they were hanging out without me because nobody wanted me around, because nobody liked me.

I remembered the time we argued about this. I’d brought up how I felt seeing them together. They told me, “We have other friends that sometimes invite us out.” “Sometimes we’re just alone.”

But it didn’t stop the spiral. Even though, as far as I knew, they’d only hung out without me once, just the two of them. Every other time, it was with people I didn’t know, or people I didn’t even want to know.

Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been banished. Unimportant. Cast aside.

Now that they live closer together, it feels like it’s going to happen more. Like I’ll be left out again and again.

There’s this one girl in the group who, to me, would never be excluded. She just radiates value. I don’t know how to do that, or how to be that. I wish I was valuable enough to be invited to everything.