Can I tell you a story?
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When I was young, I thought everyone was like me. I thought everyone could feel these things, and they just weren’t paying attention, or they were blocking it out, or something like that. I didn’t understand what it would be like not to feel it at all — to be deaf to the world.
I learned pretty quickly, I think, that I was different. I didn’t understand how the other kids could watch the worms on the wet pavement, squirming futilely for the soil, and walk away with no more than an “Aw, that’s sad”. Couldn’t they feel it? I wondered. The despair in the scene, the tragedy of it?
They used to make fun of me — stomping on the anthills I was studying, watching me cry and laughing from above.
There were some others who would pity the animals, but I don’t think they really felt what I could feel; they had something more like sympathy, maybe, than empathy. Because it’s not just the things that are alive: the pebbles scattered along the path have their own little language; the wind whispers as it sifts through the trees. I heard a cry of pain from every rock kicked along; every broken twig sent a shiver up my spine.
I tried to describe it to them, to explain myself, but they never understood. I didn’t have the words for it, back then. I’m not sure I do now.
There are some things that are just… sad, you know? I don’t know, maybe I’m just strange. But isn’t it sad when someone snaps off a branch for no reason other than to feel something break in their hands? Don’t you feel anything? Don’t you have any empathy?
I learned to push it down, to keep it hidden. I’d hold my tears inside and look away with the rest of them. It was hard — so hard, to look away. Isn’t the world just sad, even tragic, sometimes? How do you deal with it?
I’d try to find other ways around it, try to search out the good things, the joy. In the first days of spring I’d get up before the sun, bike over to the little patch of undeveloped land on the other side of town. I’d leave my bike at the base of the hill and climb up over the rocks, through the grasses and the flowers that brushed my knees, the dew soaking through my shoes and socks. At the top, I’d sit and lean back on my hands, my fingertips spreading in the dirt, and watch the sun rise over the trees.
(They cut down those trees. Once I biked there in the early morning only to be faced with a fence and a no-trespassing sign; the construction started a few days later.)
In the winter, I would sit with my nose to the window for half an hour, watching the snowflakes dance in the crepuscular half-light until it was too dark to see, listening to the music they plucked out as they gently settled down atop their predecessors. Each a part of a microscopic layer, but they would accumulate until a half-inch became one, became six. Isn’t it beautiful, each miniscule flake a part of something so much bigger?
I would flinch the morning after, when I went out to shovel the walk and my boots punched through the icy surface to the fluffy powder beneath, leaving the picturesque view permanently marred, my crunching footsteps backgrounded by the shattered serenity, ringing loud in my ears.
It wasn’t just the perfection, the pristineness of it all. There were days, too, in the springtime, when I’d lay down on my stomach in the grass, watching the water trickle down from the gutter spout as the snow melted on the roof high above our heads. I would watch, entranced, as it carved a path downhill through the dirt, a tiny river diverting itself continuously as sediment built up, winding gradually away in an ever-optimizing flow. I would drop in a pebble, a blade of grass, and watch it be swept away, listening to its sigh of contentment.
The world would call out to me, constantly; I was amazed that the others couldn’t hear it.
It’s not just nature, either. I remember how I would flinch violently when my pencil tip broke, how I would search the table afterward for the tiny snapped-off fragment of graphite. I remember the helplessness of finding a pin abandoned on the floor of a classroom, bereft of its clasp, already and irretrievably lost.
And now, every new headline a gunshot fired, a missile launched…. The rest of them don’t care that I’m still trying to get over the snow coming later and later each year; the pencil whose graphite is already shattered inside, that I keep trying to sharpen anyway; the bird that hit the window where the pane two spots over was bird-safe glass. It just keeps coming, regardless, because what does it matter to them, to society, to everyone else?
The world cries out; can’t you hear it?
I try not to think about all of it, any of it, now. There’s just too much — too many things calling out, too many pleas falling on deaf ears. I don’t know how they do it, how they manage to ignore it, to brush it off. Something inside me would snap off, when they crushed those ants for no reason; I don’t know how to react, then, to the kidnappings and the bombings, the floods and the fires. I try to block it out, the screams in my head.
Sometimes I wish I were just… like everyone else. Would it be worth it, I wonder? To be blind to the beauty, and the pain?
Why am I telling you this, you’re probably wondering. That’s just like you to ask — what does it matter to you, after all?
I don’t know, I just felt — surely there’s someone else out there, who hears the things I hear, who feels it too… surely I’m not the only one. I just wanted to put it out there, to see, I guess, if anyone would listen, and care….
Is anyone else out there listening?
Does anyone else care?
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…anyone?