I found out on the bus to the game. That some kids from that high school we were playing had been in a car accident that weekend. They'd been hit by a drunk driver on the way home from a 17th birthday celebration. We'd heard that the last surviving girl, one from the tennis team, was in stable condition. We hoped everything would be okay, but didn't think about it much. We didn't say anything. They didn't say anything. I played my match. I won. They weren't at their best, I'm sure, considering what was on their minds, but they were okay. No big deal, right?

Wrong.

As the last match was finishing, a girl got a phone call. It might have been the girl I played, I'm not sure. I wasn't looking. But the next thing I heard was someone crying over and over- "She's not dead."

And then the whole team broke down. Girls sobbing, collapsing in each other's arms. Cursing the driver who did it. I've never heard anything scarier than the sounds of these girls crying. This was raw emotion. They were unaware of anything but their grief. Not of the football team practicing a field over, not of the parents arriving to pick up their kids, not even of their own tears splashing off the courts, each drop a piece of their heart.

The girls on my team, they awkwardly stood by. It didn't mean much, so we left them without finishing the last match. Most girls didn't show much emotion- we had won anyway. They returned back to our school no more or less affected.

But I couldn't forget these girls' cries. Someone had died. A girl with a family, with friends. A girl who went shopping. Who listened to music. Who danced and sang. Who laughed. Who cried. Who had lived.

But not anymore. She had passed on, leaving broken pieces of her life behind. She wouldn't go to prom. She wouldn't graduate from college. She wouldn't get married. She would never see another sunrise.

She may be gone, but the sun would still shine. Students race from class to class. Homework and tests and life and rejection and births and deaths would still go on. But Time had stopped for these girls, for this girl. How many other people had time stop that day? How long until MY time stops? Would anyone cry for me?

I've heard it said that as soon as we are born, we begin to die. I've thought about that a lot before, and even more so now.

Death is inevitable. All we can do is wait, and hope, and try to live as best we can.

Today, a girl just like me died. As much as I wanted to, I couldn't cry. Because today was just like any other day.