Imagine that it’s graduation day; you’re the cocky, well-liked, star athlete of your school. Prior to the ceremony, you have swarms of friends and family squeezing you to the point that it’s hard to catch a breath. Picture the ceremony: the gymnasium; filled with relatives and family friends, that are very proud that you have made it this far. “Pomp and Circumstance” is playing in the background as you’re anxiously waiting to receive your diploma. While standing in line, you look back at your entire class. As your eyes are wandering, they focus in on a young lady. She’s a simple girl, her hair in fine blonde curls, her shoulders shrugged in a tense position, her face filled with terror; her eyes squinted staring directly in front of her; occasionally scanning her surroundings. Your eyes meet. The two of you study each other. You wonder, “Does she even go here?” Your brain searches for any past memories that she might have attended to but you can’t think of any. Studying her a little more and reminiscing in your past four years, suddenly it clicks. Every day you have come in contact with her, caring not to notice her. She sat diagonally to you in Psych, kiddy corner to you in choir, and three lab tables over in DNA Science.

Your name is announced over the loudspeaker. It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for since you’ve set foot in this school. Applause erupts as you strut down in full confidence, swaying your hips from side to side; snubbing your nose like you had always done before. About halfway down the runway, you glance back. She’s staring you, her eyes filled with disappointment. Once you grab your diploma, you look back at your fellow class and realize that there are several people that you haven’t noticed since junior high. You realize that you were stuck in your own little box, only associating yourself with those who you considered worthy of talking to.

Only a fragment of time has passed by now, and her name has just been called. As she comes down the aisle, something inside urges you to clap as if you were her biggest fan. Your friends join along too. When this is drawn to her attention, a huge grin comes across her face as if her day had just been made. Just then, you realize exactly why you could possibly have any sudden special connection to this girl. Your mind encounters the memory of that exact moment: when she was in the bathroom crying, reaching out for help and you blew her off, deceitfully pretending you had a prior obligation. All she needed was a friend, and you failed to present that warm friendship to her. She needed someone, and that “someone” could have been you.
In that moment of time, you bear all of her hurt. In a flash, you mentally live through her pain. You mentally experience the quiet days as a “Wallflower”. You live through sitting by yourself at the lunch table, while others pretend not to notice you. You encounter the late nights drowning in tears, pouring your thoughts into a journal. In the story To Kill a Mockingbird it states, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Just then a tear runs down your cheek because you finally fully realized what life was like from someone else’s standpoint.
After the ceremony, you are so touched that you want to talk to her. The conversation starts off a little choppy. There were a few awkward pauses in between topics while running out of things to say. Once she had warmed up, she began talking up a storm. This could possibly be because it’s rare for someone to approach her in such a friendly manner. Through this long conversation, you find out you two hold several similarities. You two grew up in the same family situation, your mother caring for you single-handed since birth. You both share interests that you thought no one on the entire earth shared with you. The two of you decide to grab a cup of coffee the next day where a few more laughs are shared, and by no time, you start completing each other's sentences. She begins opening up to you even more, helping you to fully understand her as a person, and you realize why she has been so quiet over the past years. She tells you about how she has been verbally abused over the years by her mother, causing her to stay in her own little world. Because she didn’t know how to talk to her family, she didn’t have social skills that would help her open up to her peers.
You then wish you would’ve taken the time to speak to her when there were opportunities present because a strong friendship could’ve evolved. It’s funny how you can go your whole life passing by someone, not noticing them until it’s too late. You wonder if it’s worth starting a friendship, just to say goodbye when you depart for college. That night you sit up in bed, thinking about the whole situation, but also about the other people that no one, myself included, cared to have join in.
The majority of us walk down the halls, looking the opposite direction when a fellow student passes by that you have no connection with, avoiding any type of eye contact. I’m not saying that I’m an exception to the rule, but what I am trying to express is that it shows how shallow each person is, being more concerned about their lives, even when everything is going crystal clear. We fail to notice the people hurting around us, making up excuses, like it might be an inconvenience to you.
Let’s just say you’re driving down the road, and all of a sudden, you see a sketchy kid that you recognize from school is stalled on the other side due to a flat tire. You have an emergency car kit located in your back seat. You have two options: one, you could completely avoid the situation by driving past them pretending that you don’t see the, or two, you could lift out an open arm and not expect anything back in return. Sad to say, most people would just drive past and not feel any remorse. We actually do this quite often. Someone is pouring their feelings out at us, and instead of actually listening to them and being a friend, we ignore them. You have to realize that if they are willing to pour out all of their feelings to you, there is a reasonable chance that there’s an issue in their lives and are in desperate need of help.
What about the good old days in elementary school, when discrimination of children was nonexistent? Remember when everyone was accepted because they weren’t told any different. As we get older, we tend to focus on physical flaws rather than the person that’s inside. We are all shut up in little boxes, not willing to get to know another person. Who sets the standards anyway? We all follow them, but who determines popularity? We all view others in a different way. For instance, one clique might think that another group is full of freaks, while the other thinks they’re stuck up.
There are some people that are starving for attention, but yet there’s something holding them back, causing others not to see how unique they are. Maybe, they lack social skills, like the girl from the beginning; causing it to be hard for them to approach people in the first place. Once they loosen up a bit, the others find out of how great of a person they are, and they wish they would’ve taken the time earlier in life to get to know them.
You sit there, in silence, struggling to organize your scrambled thoughts. You wonder if she’ll want to be friends with you. Since she must be used to not getting any attention, you think that maybe it will be easier for her to completely erase you out of her life as college rolls around. You’re desperately hoping that the opposite turnout would occur. Maybe because she hasn’t had a real friend in high school, she might decide to take the opportunity of planting a friendship that would hopefully bloom throughout the years.
You decide to give her a call; no one answers. You shoot her a text: no response. Reality finally hits, you realize that it’s too late. You have passed by her every day, not giving her any recognition. Now, she wants you to feel how she feels--she has done her duty.