the human mind at rest has the capability to conjure a crazy conception. weaves together the day’s events, a collection of concepts, cuts, copies, and pastes images into a new order, color screaming as vividly as hours before, in real time
but it can’t create faces.
for every face that has flown to the front of your mind is familiar. you need not recognize it, but you had to have seen it somewhere.
because the brain fails to fabricate faces, it instead returns results of people you have perhaps seen in passing.
the man doing the overnight shift at a 24 hour cvs when you flew through in a frenzy, the woman playing piano at that upscale restaurant in town, the boy who sat next to you in the subway, or the girl who ubered you home through rush hour at what is, quite frankly, an obscene surcharge…
their facades forming most of what they mean to us. maybe we’re right about who they are. probably not. our minds see faces, but not often beneath. in the inky blackness that is our imagination, their faces float forward, but our brains supply their stories.
one might never know that the neighborhood pharmacist wistfully fills prescriptions knowing that if his own children fell ill, he would be unable to foot the bill.
that the pianist puts every extra penny in her pocket, determined to take her parents to auschwitz, to see the spot theirs suffered— like the excellent accompanist she is.
that the boy on the train listens to lin-manuel miranda on loop, the beat drowning out this incessant thrum of terrible thoughts.
that your uber driver doesn’t use the money she makes for herself, she spends it on supplies to sew scarves for sexual abuse survivors.
each has a life, like you or me. they laugh and love and learn, spend and save, grin and grimace, and cry. oh dear, do they cry.
but we pass potential friends not knowing any better. forgetting that strangers have hearts just as full as ours. or perhaps just as empty. and on the off-chance we do remember that inconceivable idea, we wonder exactly what might be going on in their minds. and then realize, most simply, that all we have to do is ask.