Subway Writings

Here's an observation that morphed into a monologue while I was sitting on the subway today writing.

"A row of people with books and phones. They aren't reading the words in front of their eyes. They're reading the words of the person to their left. All of them except that poor Johnson to the very left who's got nobody next to him. So by pure circumstance, by virtue of where he is in that line, he is excluded from the artificiality that governs the projections we show others. Without choosing, he now sees that we're all desperate to know each other, so desperate that we'd rather wallow in a solitude of stolen glances and what-if's than shake hands and talk about why we bite our nails or why it's so hard to love after a broken heart. We're dying to know each other. We read, we listen to music; somehow we think that words and sounds published and distributed are more cogent to our immediate lives than the person next to us. That's how life goes. You get this spectrum of relational mirrors where some people you know so well they become strangers, and some are so estranged that there is this profound connection you have, and that's, like, 90% of earth's population you're deeply connected to through this necessary, circumstantial estrangement. Question is, do we realize how how close we all are?"