Vent Art+Story

Instructions

So, there’s this guy at my school, right? Let’s call him… Bert? Yeah that works. We met through some mutual friends- let’s see… Alex and Timmothy -and we always sat at lunch together, just the four of us. We got along great, and it’s been about… 3 years since I first met him. So basically he’s been adopted into our group. Since then we also added another guy- Ean? -to our table and we’ve all loved it, until about Octoberish? When Bert randomly started ghosting me, and I was like, ‘Oh, no! I must’ve done something to offended him!’ So I tried apologizing to him, Via text, email, you name it. No response. Until one day, when he just showed up like nothing had ever happened and just acted normal. So I was like….. okay???? And didn’t think much of it until December, when he started doing it AGAIN! I was so confused and tried apologizing again, and the same thing happened- sometime in January, he random came back, acted like nothing happened, and inserted himself back into our group. And everything was fine? No. Of course not. See, end of January-beginning of march I started using my lunch period to practice for region solo and ensemble(for which I was playing a flute solo). Afterwords, I tried sitting with these friends again- but sometime while I was gone, they had started some sort of game? (Outside school) and as soon as I sat down, Bert started bringing it up all mysterious-like, and wouldn’t answer any of my questions. He would just laugh at me like I had said something hilarious and make some sort of comment about how I didn’t know anything about it. He started PURPOSEFULLY excluding me from conversations, and even started making rude comments under his breath throughout the day- for example: I was playing Swedish twister with a different friend group, and he walked by and, loudly enough that I could hear, said: ‘wow, that’s such a dumb game.’ Soon, I couldn’t bare sitting with them, /HIM/, any longer, and started making up excuses to avoid them. Bert was always tagging along with our mutual friends, so I eventually ended up avoiding them as well- which I can tell hurts them, because they don’t know why. I started reading in my free time instead of talking to anyone, because I don’t feel like communicating. I DREAD going to school and taking lunch breaks because it’s just another time I have to pretend I’m doing fine. I’m always tired, physically and mentally, and I just want to be alone, except at the same time, I want to be with my friends, and talk like we used to. EDIT: while I’m still kinda in this stupid situation, it’s a lot better now :)