The Girl in the Corner

         A young girl sat in the corner of her first-grade classroom.  She watched the other students.  She laughed when they laughed, cried when they cried.  She watched without being seen, an invisible friend of the people around her.

         The girl watched.  The girl learned.  She remained unseen.  She was not remembered by people around her, either student or teacher.  Nobody called her friend, but she would have called anybody else her friend.

         As the young girl grew into a teenager, she listened to the people around her.  She heard their stories and kept them quietly locked inside her heart.  It was not long before the adventures she had heard and seen began to merge into one giant story that was trying desperately to get out.

         In high school, the girl began to write.  She started slowly, letting out only tiny pieces of the story at one time.  Soon, however, the words began to pour onto the paper, spreading over notebooks, journals, index cards, and anything else that could be written on.

         The girl wrote in all her spare time, allowing the writing to take over her body and her life.  She barely graduated from high school and chose not to go to college.  She allowed the writing to consume her, but nobody else seemed to notice.

         She lived alone for years, but she could afford it.  She worked for a small magazine, a place that paid her for the tidbits of story that she could sell.  Most of her story was saved, though, kept bundled together into a binder that was growing with every passing day.  Finally, though, she was ready.

         Fifteen years after graduation, a new author published her first book.  It was a story of life, written directly from the soul of a girl who saw everything through the eyes of the people around her.  Nobody recognized the author's name.  Nobody knew that this author was once the girl in the corner, the budding flower that everybody forgot.

         People who had been in class with the girl from first grade did not recognize her.  They did not realize that the book that they all enjoyed had been dedicated to them:

"Dedicated to the people whose stories made mine possible.  Thanks."