He was in his usual hiding place. It was not so much that people couldn’t find him here, they just never bothered to look. In fact, people never bothered to look at him when he was out in the open. That’s what hurt. He was the great unforgotten. No friends, nothing special to boast about, no great wit to speak of, just part of the background.

Nobody wants to be part of the furniture. You never read about heroes who were just present when something happened. In this world, you have to be special. You have to stand out. Everyone aspires to being the best at something. Yet he couldn’t even get an honourable mention. Most people he knew didn’t even speak to him.

So he was hiding. This was his attempt to engage being unnoticed on his own terms. By squeezing between three trees in the park, which had happened to grow too close to each other, he could disappear chameleon-like into the foliage. For just a few hours each day, nobody noticed him because he was hiding, not because he wasn’t special.

He toyed with using this self-inflicted invisibility as an opportunity to purge himself of his tensions. He thought about shouting out to heavens about the prettiest girl in school “Will you stop being so hot and yet so totally unaware of me?” but he decided not to. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself.