It's an uncomfortable longing, pining is. It implies wanting something so badly and yet... doing absolutely nothing about it. It's a passive state of mind, eating away at your meager confidence and diverting your attention away from what's important.

I did way too much pining in elementary school. Why didn't I have any friends? Why wasn't I cool? Why won't the popular girls talk to me? Why couldn't I be more like them?

Then in sixth grade, I tried something. At that time, slam books were popular. A slam book was a sheaf of papers stapled together, and each page had someone's name on it. This booklet was passed around and people would go to each page and write what they thought of each person.

Since people rarely spoke to me, I had no idea what they thought of me. So I made a slam book. I wrote in the names of the students in my class, including my own name. This was my grand plan to find out what people actually thought of me.

Clever, right?

Well...

So my slam book circulated around the class, and when I finally got it back, I eagerly looked through it. I flipped straight to my page. Almost all the way across the board, people simply wrote "Nice." One guy had written "cool," then crossed it out and replaced it with "nice."

So... basically I was boring. But at least no one disliked me.

But I learned something else.

There was a girl in our class, let's call her Corngirl, because I think she was from Nebraska. Corngirl stood out, and not in a good way. She was quite tall for a sixth-grader, with spindly limbs, pale complexion, pale blonde hair, eyebrows so light she looked like she had none, and an unfortunate haircut. She never did anything mean to anyone, and yet, on the Corngirl page of my slam book, the majority of the people had written "Bitch." For no good reason other than she didn't fit in.

And now the part that I'm still ashamed of to this very day.

I had written "bitch" too. Because everyone else did. Because I wanted to be cool.

After school that day, I saw her. She was alone, face red and blotchy from crying. And I knew why. I hadn't been cool that day. I'd been mean. I knew her to be a nice person, just like I was, and I had written a nasty word to describe her.

Mean, mean, mean.

I felt like the worst person in the world. A total asshole.

I wanted to go up to her and apologize, tell her I didn't mean it, and that I'm sorry everyone else said those things. That they probably didn't mean it either. That they were just trying to be cool.

But I didn't.

I chickened out. I retreated back into my shell. And I threw that stupid slam book away.

So, Corngirl, if you're still out there, I'm sorry. If I hadn't been such a pathetic little piner, none of that would have happened.

And maybe we could have even been friends.