'Ignored' by Katy Ward

 He kept silently repeating an extract from a novel he'd read the previous night as he drifted off to sleep. Cold and alone. 

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room."

 He already felt like an angsty teenage cliché so why not immerse himself in The Bell Jar? 

Today, standing next to Dan and Jenna, it felt like the book could have been written about his own life.

 

Not that the group of women in the sushi bar at the other side of the food court would have had a clue Dan and Jenna were crazy about each other. 

They seemed aloof, bored even, as though they were discussing whose turn it was to empty the dish washer. Would it feel so anti-climactic when, if, he ever found someone? 

Dan had bragged that he'd slept with Jenna the previous night. It had been a first for both of them. He’d told her “I love you” amidst the awkward fumbling and meant it. 

Of course, Dan hadn't asked where his best friend had spent the previous night or how things were with his parents. 

He was suddenly distracted by a speck of mud on the toe of his left trainer. He'd managed to scrub himself up pretty well after a night sleeping under a tree in the city centre’s main park, but he'd clearly missed a spot.

 “It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction –every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier.”