I am a very reserved person before you actually get to know me and for most people, getting to know me is a big L. That is only talking about the present though. If we were to go back in time three years, I would not have only been hard to know, I would even be hard to find. Junior year of high school. Brooklyn Technical High School was already an enormous school. With nine floors and nearly six thousand students, it would be no surprise if any given person was known by at least a couple hundred of other people. This is where I showed a skill cultivated over countless years. Being almost nonexistent. After accidentally walking into an office freshman year to hand in my lunch form late, I manage to get a position as an office monitor in the Office of Parent and Student Engagement. That is a whole other set of stories that will probably be used in future prompts but we’ll get to that when the time comes.

If I wasn’t in class, I was in the office. In exchange for the work I did there, I was able to escape the putrid spell of the lunchroom and the noise of near a thousand teenagers concentrated in a single space. Because of this no one really knew me though. My main friend group consisted of around 7 people and it did not grow past that until senior year of high school but once again, future prompts. Sure, many people knew the name Mamadou, but I wasn’t the only Mamadou Diallo in the school and the other one very quickly took the limelight, letting me enjoy my time comfortably in the shadows. That is one of the few times I really felt anonymous and I don’t see it as something negative either. Back then I preferred being unknown.