It was a September morning in 2010. The kind where the sun would kiss your face and stain your eyes. The smell of well-tended grass began to fill the air, as Mrs. Bailey parted the gates to freedom. Little gremlins that adults would sometimes jokingly refer to as four-year-olds poured out of the weathered, brick building onto the equally weathered playgrounds. These ex-rug rats quickly pooled into small factions in the name of survival. Mutual daycares, communities, and favorite colors brought these socially maladroit children together. They dispersed into the fields, playsets, and courts. Consumed by countless dodge ball recoils and boisterous chatter. The bright blue sky was cloaked out of sight above a blanket of blinding light. Beneath it all but one child remained, looking out into the sea of small children. He turned to look up at his teacher who locked up the door behind her.

“Who do I play with?” he asked in an earnest, high-pitched voice.

“Oh, you can play with anyone you’d like, Sam--maybe Riley could play with you.” She said turning to a smaller boy from the class who hadn’t found a faction yet. Riley looked up at Mrs. Bailey, looked to the boy, and back to the teacher, then bolted into the opposite direction without a word. The child looked at her with a frown, sadness creeping into the corners of his eyes and the edges of his lips.

“Just go find someone to play with.” She said out of inspiring words. Our pint-sized boy shuffled himself over to the nearest playset. The only souls present were the ones of a third-grader and two colossal fourth-graders, each towering under the tallest playset platform. The boy was socially gifted and dauntless compared to his peers. Either that or just unfathomably oblivious. Whatever it was, the little boy waltzed up to the older kids.

“-and a little bit of Call of Duty. All night long,” One of the colossal fourth-graders bellowed, his voice shaking the beams that held the slide.

“Sick!” the third-grader said slightly too avidly. His eyes shot up at the two giants searching for appeasement as if it were absent, he’d be eaten.

“My brother plays that game!” The two giants craned their heads, voraciousness diluting from their eyes, becoming puzzled by the dinky parasite at their feet.

“Oh yeah?” spoke the more talkative giant. The gnawing teeth of curiosity and opportunity puncturing the necks of the colossal figures.

“Yeah, and he’s pretty good, too.” The little spud said reminiscing on the memories of his brother slaying thousands of soldiers and zombies. Sam’s brother was centuries older and two times the size of the three. Perhaps a deity compared to these meek giants. They of course had no way of knowing that.

“Not better than me,” defended the dominant giant, who was now representing the group as far as the verbal contributions went. His adamancy thickening along with the insecurity building in his eyes.

“He probably is, I mean, he’s like… Really good,” Sam’s argument teetering off-balance in redundancy. The silent giant rolled his eyes and the third-grader beamed enthralled eyes at the main giant. Eagerly waiting for his reaction.

“Wanna fight? Huh?” The lead giant boomed, stomping out of his cave and bathing himself in blinding light. Behind him, the two others shifted stances to follow his assault.

“I would if I could but… Not here. Maybe later,” Sam quipped, eager to fight but predicting the consequences.

The giant pressed forward, pushing Sam up against the staircase of an elaborate fortress. Sam quickly scaled over flimsy bridges and up jagged plastic walls to keep distance as the giant slowly plowed effortlessly through the same obstacles. The other two trailed the pursuit a bit behind, taking a backseat to the event taking place. Not a word was uttered during the chase between either party. Sam didn’t need words--he could tell from the colossus’s fixation on him and the stream of smoke flowing from his ear-like chimneys that the giant was pissed. Not pissed, livid. Sam had perhaps stolen the one thing this giant could call his own. He was rather hefty, somewhat unsightly, and certainly not very fast. Maybe Call of Duty was the only thing this odd ogre could call his own. Although accidental, Sam couldn’t stop moving to apologize now. Eventually, after flipping through numerous floors, Sam met a dead-end. Backed up in a deserted watchtower on a cliff just above the giant’s cavern, the giant caught up to Sam. Without hesitation, the giant grabbed him by the arm and twisted. An uncomfortable look swept onto Sam’s face which paled in comparison to the joints in his arm that screamed with pain. Quickly thinking, Sam swiftly, wriggled out of the giant’s clutches and jumped off the tower, freefalling into a lake a quarter-mile below at the very bottom of the canyon.

To this day, I occasionally wonder if it actually happened or if I had simply imagined it. It just seemed so fabricated and too odd. Alas, an older kid had twisted my arm. I felt somewhat cynical, hungry for vengeance. A month later after the incident, I found the same third grader that was in the giants’ company. It was the end of lunch in early October. The sterile, grey walls of the lunchroom marked the bounds of chaos and criminally underrated sandwiches that I still miss. The factions of my class declared war on one another for the fourth time that week. Despite the warfare, we were all unified by the fear of our superiors and gathered in a somewhat disorderly line to depart back to class. As a nomadic adventurer with stories of giants and unwarranted obsessions with Ghostbusters, I stood in the back of the line. I watched my peers tear each other apart, when all of a sudden, something infinitely more interesting caught my attention. A long-faced third-grader walked along the back corridor in which the kindergarten wars were taking place. I immediately recognized the matted brown hair, pasty white skin, and large lips.

"Mrs. Buelow!" I yelled in a meek voice that was bordering on that of a mouse. By some miracle, my small, quiet arrow threaded through the ruckus and found its mark in my teacher's ear. 

“Yes?” She said slightly displeased by the projectile now protruding from her ear.

“That's one of the guys I was talking about!” I said with unfathomable excitement. He froze in fear and shot looks of confusion at my teacher. It had been the least perpetrator but I had found him. A small minnow in an ocean of fish. And I had him. Justice would be served.

“Okay, well…” Mrs. Buelow looked at him and back at me. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“I…” I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t mortally wounded by the group and it wasn’t even the guy. Did I really even care? Why was I so bent on bringing these kids in? At some point, while I was thinking about what I wanted his sentence to be, the boy had thawed out and fled.

I went home that night and thought hard. Why should they be punished? What did they really do? They were just kids protecting frail feelings, and I was spitballing about my idol who happened to play the same game. I discerned a vital lesson that night. A lesson that is so rudimentary but somehow so rare. A lesson that I have worked tirelessly to integrate into my life: don’t take anything personally because it isn’t. No one will go around to twist your arm because they want to. Most of the time it is a product of irritability and insecurity that that person will be suffering from. Understanding that everyone suffers is paramount to not being so miserable all the time. Sometimes we just need to understand each other, and if we can do that, then we can play with anyone we’d like.