1AM: What Makes You Sad

I've just realized that no one has called me by my full name in a long time. 

(the times where they call out my name in school doesn't count and neither does it when my mother uses it as the leading sentence to a lecture/diatribe.) 

(because i know what counts and what doesn't.)

I fashioned myself a name that was ripped off from a sappy romance novel (guess which one) after deciding five years ago that alanis was lame. (because that wasn't what popular girls were called, that wasn't what pretty girls were called, and i wanted to be both.) (that was what people made fun of because it rhymed with a submerged city, because in my language it rhymed with rats and brooms and something sour.)  

What's that saying? The one where if you repeat something enough times then you start to believe in it? After I kept insisting, people have called me allie enough times for me and everyone else to forget that I was ever called anything else.

So here's the division:

Alanis and Allie.

It's no Gregorian calendar but it divides my life pretty accurately into two significant eras.

alanis was the age of honor rolls and an actual best friend and days when i had confidence and a belief in myself. When I actually excelled at things and my parents could brag about me and I didn't worry about how I looked because back then people cared about how smart you were and not how your hair was cut a certain way.

allie is the age of fitting in and first loves and kind of heartbreaks where I 'literally' wished I died. The age of lonely nights and solitary trips to the mall and not knowing if I have any real friends because if I did then where the fuck are they is what I want to know. It's the age of looking in the mirror and feeling so incredibly unsatisfied with what I see.

I'd laugh at how much has changed but wow, didn't that get sad. :))

But what's in a name, anyway? They're nothing but markers, distinctions between two volumes of the same book. It's the girl that changed and that's what makes me sad. 

[A footnote: There are people, though, that call me something else entirely. A name that was bred from years of familiarity and an insistence for some things staying the same. And despite everything that prevents me from calling them friends, those people are the ones that I like best. And most times they're the ones who keep me from being sad.]