Animate the dead

As a college student who lived two rides and 90 minutes away from my university campus, I remember each trip (that I did not sleep through) as a private guessing game with no resolution. I would stare at the faces of the strangers who shared this public space with me and I would begin a journey of wonderment — a wondering-chain-of-thought, if you will: Where is this person going? What is so important that he needs to get there at this time? Who is waiting for him to arrive? What is in his bag? What did he have for breakfast? Did he oversleep? What did he do last night?

Why is his nose crooked?

Who gave him that shirt?

Barring a manic mood that would lead me to seek these answers via direct interrogation (read: invasion), none of the answers were ever available. What further fascinates me is how none of these answers will matter to me as soon as my mind wanders into new areas of wonderment. And to this stranger whose answers matter not, I matter even less.

There is something tragic about the idea that a bus can be filled with people who make no difference to one another. There is something alien about the idea that a world can be populated by people whose lives are lived out in completely separate worlds. I get off the bus, and he is dead. So am I.

If I did not believe in ghosts, I would only need to turn my head — towards, say, the sea of vehicles that compose the inanimate mess we call traffic — to see a collection of lost souls. Aside from fulfilling their function of filling up EDSA to inconvenience me, do they actually exist?

The world I walk around in is filled with beauty and profundity and things that matter, but they mostly remain invisible because they are unnecessary to me.

The flowers I don’t stop to smell. The stray dog trotting off to God-cares-where. The woman with a grocery cart full of plastic plates and potato chips. The street kid whose name I didn’t bother to ask because I was too busy trying to chase him away from my window with spare change.

The sky goes over my head. The earth is beneath me. Art? Music? People?

Dead by default. As invisible and unappreciated as the air I breathe almost 30,000 times a day.

One of the many ugly things I discovered about people — and by people

I mean myself — I discovered in high school. At a stage in my life when selecting which warm bodies to surround myself with was the number one preoccupation, I had figured out many different ways to “assess” and “judge” who was worthy of attention and who was not. Was this my first significant encounter with murder-by-invisibility?

It would not be my last.

It was a system that just took over naturally, until the day someone made it off of the invisible list and jumped out in front of me. The disturbing part was the manner by which this person-of-no-previous-consequence jumped out: a friend had simply whispered to me that this particularly invisible female had a huge crush on me.

The Super Secret Law of Mutual Interest for the Insecure Robot: “I am interested if you are interesting, and you are interesting only if you are interested… in me.”

I, Robot, lived passively and blindly within this law. I saw no flowers, sun, sky, dogs, street kids, art, music, people… no missions or burning ambitions, and no answer to the question: “What did I want to be when I grew up?”

The only question I wanted to find an answer to was “Who liked me?” and what I wanted to be when I grew up was… liked.

I am not sure if I grew up at all, and I am less sure if I found myself liked. What I did find was that I was constantly fighting off a world that I did not like: demanding bosses, sniveling co-workers, unreasonable clients, clumsy waiters, stupid fast-food order takers.

Like cars in traffic, these likenesses of God could only be perceived in the contexts of use, entertainment and inconvenience. When their moments passed, I gave them the gift of invisibility.

It took me too long to realize how careless I had been with all this invisibility. In using my power to make things disappear with a backward wave of my hand, I was making myself disappear as well — one piece at a time.

This is murder. This is suicide.

This Super Secret Law creates a wall between the living and the dead.

I do not write these laws, and I do not control how things work... but

I can try to understand. I can stand on the other side of the wall and examine my choices.

I choose. To be the initiator of interest, instead of the passive and hopeful recipient of it. To ask for the answers and not wait for them to be revealed. To tap the shoulder of the behemoth blocking my view of the movie instead of muttering about my bad luck. To tell people how I think and feel even when I have reason to believe they are psychic.

To materialize into people’s lives instead of making them disappear from mine. To shout “I see you!” instead of “Look at me!”

The fewer ghosts I create, the easier it becomes for me to… be.

I can choose to believe that a friend is in a galaxy far, far away, and she dies. With a random thought, I can choose to find her, and she is alive again. So am I.

I can choose to be interested in a painting, or a rock on the ground, or the face of the random stranger on the bus… in my sister, my mother, my neighbor… and each one becomes a mirror. With each reflection staring back at me, I am no longer invisible to myself.

I see them, I see me, and I realize there is a Corollary to the Super

Secret Law of Mutual Interest for the Insecure Robot:

“Interest is returned… with Interest!”