Sometimes I wonder if there’s a difference in seeing the world and seeing the people who inhabit it. I’m starting to see so much more of our earth, and I’ve observed many more of its citizens, but I can’t say that I’ve gotten to really know many more of them. There’s a difference between understanding or simply knowing a person, and I feel like the difference has just become more pronounced the more I walk, the more that I don’t talk to people, but just watch them go about their everyday lives. This is the problem with being an introvert: I can always gather information about others, I can see and make keen observations, I can be okay with not saying a single word all day, but it leaves me looking like loner to everyone else.

I’m not unapproachable, I promise. I’m not judging you when I see you. I just like to watch you, to get to know you better than you might know yourself.

So if you see me on the streets and I don’t say hello, don’t be afraid to say it first. It’s not that I don’t want to or that I haven’t already thought about you - I just can’t summon the courage to start a conversation.

And I didn’t see anything but the swerve of the road, the straight dashed lines becoming curved bee-paths as I tried to control the metal monster ravaging the pavement at seventy miles per hour.

The other car didn’t even look.  It just started coming right: over, over over - me, in its blind spot, unaware because I was trying to pass on my right, my eyes over my shoulder, until mom started yelling, “Watch him!”  And then, an inch between our cars, I turned the wheel so sharply to get away, and it felt like all control was gone.  The inky peach sky was melting into the horizon and into the ditch, barely past the light post, where I suddenly found myself.

Shift into park.  Assess all nerves and body parts - all in working order, no pain.  No contact made by the car.  Mom is okay.  She leaves the car, starts towards the policeman who has pulled over next to us, who saw everything.  Hear them talking: muffled buzz.  Suddenly, I’m hyperventilating and crying.  Outside my window, the cop, “Are you okay, ma’am?”  Open the car door.  Step out.  Nod; but still crying.  Ask mom, “Is the car okay?”  She laughs, “That doesn’t matter.  And it’s fine.”  She tries to hug me, but I’m shaking too badly to reciprocate.  Words and images flash by - Mom calls her boyfriend, the cop assesses the car, then he pulls it onto the shoulder of the road from the ditch.

All the while, I’m a shaking leaf of grass in the Illinois evening, standing by, seeing all of this unfold but not really understanding it, still not grasping how my atoms are all still aligned.

On the ride home, noiseless tears kept slipping down my cheeks as I cradled myself in the passenger seat, and Mom just thought I was still upset from the almost-accident.  But all I could think about was my sightlessness.  In those moments when the car was controlled by no one or nothing, and I saw us steering towards the light pole, I saw nothing of my life as I’ve heard happens.  I thought I was dying right then, that those moments may have been my last, and all I could see was the beauty of the last moments of the sunset.  I felt like a failure, like all my life had been a heap of little somethings that, in summation, became a whole mastaba of nothing that I would be buried in.  If I saw nothing, then I must have done nothing.

But I think now that I may have been wrong on that ride back, that my adrenaline had rushed to brain.

Maybe my life is adumbrated by that sunset.  It’s filled with beauty, and indicates beginnings and endings, and is a time of rising and falling, and is a time of coalescing colors and times and feelings and people.  That’s why I saw only peach, coral, the lightest of yellows, and the faintest of blues before my black car skidded around into the ditch - life is a sunset.

When I’m at the airport, I sit and watch all the other people, and I think about if they’re thinking about me as much as I think about them. I contemplate their whole lives as we sit together at the gates - each of us minding our own business and sitting an appropriate number of chairs away from each other. These people are just as complicated as I am, and their lives are probably more webbed than mine with mutiny or love or secrets or regrets. Each piece of what they have carried to the airport says something about those hidden truths that we each try to hide behind our zoned boarding passes and slightly-too-big carry-ons.

Is that it—? Have we carried too much? Do we bring too much of ourselves with us wherever we go? Are we too afraid to leave some of ourselves behind in lieu of new adventures?

I think so. I think people like their rolling bags that drag behind them like all the dead weight of their lives because it makes them feel safe.

I’m tired of feeling safe.

I’ve been thinking that somewhere inside of me there’s this smothered albatross waiting for me to consciously realize it’s there so it can tell me, “It’s all okay, Ash. I’m going to take over. You’ve done your best to follow the path society has set out for you, but now, let me show you something new, something abstruse to be sure, but something worthwhile.” And I may fight the bird at first, struggle to convey my concerns of leaving so many things behind, so many dreams peremptorily unfulfilled, but I eventually would fail to argue with any fragment of logical stamina. The albatross is right, of course. And I give in.