The girl I'm in love with says she feels invisible because the boy she has a crush on doesn't notice the dimples in the corners of her mouth or when her hair is ******* in a messy bun, exposing her lightly freckled neck.

I try to comfort her but she tells me I have no idea what its like to feel so invisible, to try so hard to be someone that someone will see as someone but they only see the girl in the dress, the girl with the eyes, the girl with the grades, the girl with the thighs, the girl with the smile.

“You've never even liked a guy that much!” she laughs, I like her laugh a lot.

She's right. I've never liked anyone as much as I like her. Love her. I love her.

Feeling invisible isn't at simple as she thinks it is. He stares at Charlotte instead of her because she has big ***** or because they're friends or because they've been forced to work on a project together. Charlotte has relevance in his life. He pays attention to Charlotte instead of her simply because we just don't pay much attention to beings that are not really in our universes.

But she is in my universe. She is the sun and the stars and the meteor showers predicted next April. She is the inhabitable territory of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune. Never stopping to think, just moving and spinning and dancing. She is the hope of life, of love, of a future on Mars.

I notice her. When she walks into a room my eyes follow her and she always responds with this huge dorky grin. She looks right at me. But she doesn't see me.

She runs up to me. Hugs me. Kisses me on the cheek. I feel her arms wrap around my waist from behind. She giggles into my neck when we cuddle on her bed and I feel numb in the best of ways as she texts that boy who wants to take her to prom. I can feel her heart racing, waiting desperately for his reply. I hope she can't feel mine hammering in my chest as she absent-mindedly strokes the fabric of my skirt at the top of my thigh.

Her blood is laced with cheap ***** and her fingers are laced in mine. She's dancing out of time to a song neither of us know or like. Her ice blue eyes are fixed on him but her hips are grinding against me. I am important to her. But as a weapon to get what she wants rather than a treasure she strives for. She's using both of us in different ways; we're both okay with it somehow. He finds it hot that she's being “*****” with another girl but he's not frightened by it as I am frightened by his power to hurt her. She pulls me so close to her I can't breathe but I don't care. Her mouth is on mine and she tastes of him and her own regrets and her low self esteem and the coffee he bought her before school. But none of that matters; I am kissing her and she's soft and she's tender yet she's fierce like an animal that's just been released from the tiniest cage into the impossible wild.

When girls kiss girls it is “fun, it is “experimentation”, it is a drunken fumble, a spur of the moment, a sign of friendship. It is not love. It is a joke. I am a joke. She is laughing at me. He is laughing at me. They are laughing together, then kissing together.

At the end of the night she cries on my shoulder. She tells me she hates men, hates them hates them ******* hates them. She tells me she wishes we could just get married.