High School and Colleges

For a few years I didn't touch a cigarette, until that summer I took to
smoking tobacco roll-owns while I was on the Westerns craze, reading
one Westerns paperback after another in my voracious appetite for all
things Westerns.
I read horror and science-fiction novels, short stories.
I'm a regular bookworm, devouring the books while I smoked to feel
grown-up in the dark room of my bedroom I shared with my little
brother, with only a tiny corner of the window to let in fresh air.
I know, I hardly went out.
During my childhood and teens, I got sick of standing around doing
nothing while my little brother drags me here and there all over
Fremantle and the surrounding suburbs chatting to people, while I stand
around doing nothing, deaf, silent, alone even with people around me.
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And I have my cravings to know what people say, what they think of
things, but I was so shy, I never say a word, mostly I waited so I can be
at home so I can get at the books.
I was so hungry inside my soul, hungry to know the world around
me.I took to refusing my little brother and friend's invitation to go out to
places I knew I would be bored out of my skull, fearing boredom more
than anything else, preferring my books to their worlds of talking
whatever they talks about that they find so interesting.
I glimpsed this stuff in the books, so my books was my only means of
connecting with the world around me, even if it is fiction, but that was
better than standing there trying to guess whoever was saying a second
ago and keeping track of conversations of who said what. (sighs).
I guess they never thought about what I felt, how isolated I felt, how
lonely I felt, even when they includes me in some conversations, but I
always can see, how impatient they get to move on, to stop lagging
behind in order to includes me in some of their conversations.
It doesn't matter.
I live in my world and that is all that matters to me.
The world out there do not exist for me anymore.
I have not smoked during my early high school, but by the time I
enters my third year high school, a different one than the two years I
went to previously, I enters a world where peer pressure enacts
enormous pressures on everyone, except for those who don't give a
damn.