Everyday I cried as I walked home from school.

I'd follow the creek from the football field, through the grounds of a building that used to be an elementary school until there weren't enough children in the community to keep it open, through the stretch of trees that seemed like an immense forest to me because I'd never seen a real forest, to my house. And I tried not to cry; tried to surreptitiously wipe away the tears pooling in the frames of my glasses by pretending I was scratching an itch on my nose.

I cried in the mornings before school. Sometimes I tried to fake a stomach ache so I wouldn't have to go, but stomach aches only work a few times a year, which still left the 175 days of school to deal with. And sometimes I awoke in the middle of the night, crying, with a real stomach ache. I never knew why, because I didn't think that I had anything to cry about.

I wanted so desperately to be the person everyone told me I was. Because they told me I was too smart to be barely pulling B's, and not smart enough to be in the advanced level courses, and too clumsy to be in athletics, and too small or too thin or too introverted for anything else. And they didn't want to smile with me or sit at my lunch table or be my lab partner because I was too strange, or stuck up, or unknown because I would sit in class and never say a word. And I'd walk between classes with my head down and spend every extra minute in the library because the books couldn't laugh at me.

I was the person no one knew existed, but everyone knew because they all talked about me when they didn't know I was there. Yet, if I wasn't there they'd never know I was gone. And no one wanted to break the vow of silence that followed me, and I didn't understand the rules that would allow me to break it. So I kept trying too hard to be what they said I should be, wearing the clothes they said I should wear, and speaking the words they said I should speak. But I never caught on to the trends until they weren't trendy anymore, which just gave them more to laugh about; sometimes to my face and sometimes behind my back.

They'd laugh at my interests because they weren't their interests, and they'd laugh until I started to cry, which just made them laugh some more. And sometimes I thought everything they did have mean intentions. And sometimes everything they did, did. And they never understood that I didn't think it was funny. Whatever the joke of the hour was, to me wasn't a joke. Except it was I who was the joke and I never caught on to that, until it didn't matter if I laughed or cried because there was no difference between the two.

And then school ended and it no longer mattered what they wore, said, did or laughed at because we all moved on. All of a sudden, it didn't matter who we had been, hadn't been, or tried to be because all that mattered was where we were going. And we were all going there by ourselves anyway. Only now being by myself is what I was good at, and I had cried all my tears, leaving nothing more worth crying about.

And I saw schools with so many children that they needed that abandoned building. And I saw a real forest and a real river and thought about my creek and my strand of trees, and I remembered shedding tears over things that I thought had been important. Only it wasn't important, significant, or life changing to anyone but me. And in the scheme of things, I wasn't important, significant, or life changing to anyone except all those people who's lives mine had touched ... even just long enough for a brief snicker.