I'm nobody special. No one really is, you know. Or everyone is.

Look around you right now. Say you're on the bus. That woman over there, in the neon pink pencil skirt and nearly-fishnet-but-safe-for-work tights? She lost her husband in a train crash last week. Would you know it to look at her? She doesn't look sad. That doesn't mean she isn't. She's crying inside, shattered in a million pieces. She keeps checking her phone out of habit for the message from him that will never come, and every time she does, her heart breaks again.

How about the young man over to your right - that's him, in the blue blazer, looks like he's wearing his dad's clothes and playing dress-up but really he's the day manager of a warehouse. He's jamming along to his tunes, on his way to work, trying not to think about the bruises his wife left on his arm last night. Nothing kinky, I'm afraid - he's a battered husband, but he won't leave her because he loves her too much. Scratch that - he fears her too much to leave, and to admit what's going on to anyone else would make him feel ashamed, a lesser man than even she accuses him of being.

Behind and to your left is a woman with a book, immersed in another world. Look at her. She looks perfectly normal, but there's something about her she doesn't like to share. She remembers everything. Not the way you do, in wisps and maybe-it-was-like-that, but clear and vivid, the good and the bad, the crippling fears, the decisions that were right only in retrospect, the middling mundanities you usually filter out. Along with each one comes the way she felt as it happened, as clear and plain as if it was actually happening to her now. All of her lifetime compressed into her consciousness. What kind of burden would that be? Would you be able to handle it?

Those are just three out of the hundreds of people you'll run into today. Every one of them isn't special, and every one of them is. Every person in the world has a story full of heart rending pain, blowing bubbles in the back yard, soul crushing loss, riding ponies by a lake, wishing they'd said something different, wishing they hadn't.

I'm nobody special, and this is my story.