Alone in the Corridor

I am a solitary creature of habit and I am uncomfortable with change.

Everyday I take the same path from my home to work, and back again. I walk the same streets, make the same turns, cross at the same crosswalks.

Except today. Today was different.

I was traveling my usual route to work when I turned onto one of the larger commuter corridors between my two destinations, and everything changed in an instant. The moment I entered the mass of people pushing up and down the corridor it was like the air was sucked out of every person all at once.

They all stopped moving in a single instance. Every single person. Staring directly at me.

It was over in what I’m sure was only a second or two but what felt like forever. It felt endless. Like living and dying multiple lives in the course of a single breath.

I do not know what they saw in me, but they saw something. And for a moment, it changed them. Took them over. Possessed them and caused them all to scrutinize the source of their collective awareness and discomfort.

Me.

So many faces stared at me. So many emotions. Disgust and fear. Curiosity. Confusion? Definitely anger. Some even seemed to hate me. Others looked to pity me or feel sorry for me. No one laughed and neither did I. There was nothing funny about this shared moment between myself and the people in the corridor.

But of all the possible emotions and feelings thrust upon me by the collective of scrying eyes, disinterest was not one of them. Whether I sickened them or amused them. If they found me interesting and pitiful or despised me and wanted to carve out my eyes, they all watched me with full and absolute attention.

I stood silent and shaking before them. Clammy skin and a crawling spine. Powerless to speak or breath or move. Such inexplicable discomfort had befallen me at this moment. The weight of their gaze seemed to bring pressure down around my skull, invading my thoughts and smothering my consciousness. I felt sick and ready to collapse yet still they gawked at me. Like some sickly animal clinging to its life without realizing it was already dead. Poor me. Like a deer hit by a car with its legs broken trying to get up. Its front hooves clacking at the pavement hopelessly. Or a dying new born bird who had fallen out of its nest onto a hot summer sidewalk. Dehydrated and scorched. One time when I was travelling off the coast of Spain, I saw a sickly Macaque lying just off the side of a well-traveled footpath. Its breathing was fast and shallow. Its hair was matted and it stunk. Flies covered the wretch as it was unable to even pick up its head or swat the pests away. Above it, two grotesque black vultures sat on a powerline waiting for their meal to give up. Yet still the Macaque kept breathing its shallow breaths. Kept living. As long as it could. Why? The people on the foot path stopped occasionally to cover their mouths and point and sigh. Sounds of sorrow and pity. Some even took pictures of the meek thing in its last moments. It had their attention and elicited their various emotional responses. But only for a moment before it was forgotten. Left alone to its death throes and undignified public display of life's end.

I imagined in this instance, to my uninvited surveyors, I looked something like that sick dying monkey. Pathetic in near death. Not self aware enough to notice the futility of my own attempt at a life.

But for a moment, I was the center of attention in that corridor. For all I know at that moment I was the center of all things and all people in the world. From every latitude and longitude across the globe, each person stopped and turned towards me. And they saw me. The source of every emotion imaginable. Eye opening for some, stomach turning for others. Brand new and never before seen. Revolutionary and repulsive all at once. Then, in another moment, I had never even existed. They would have stepped right through me if not for this unfortunate vessel which lumbers around containing all my delusions about the “self” and the “I” and the “me”.

In that moment, before they had forgotten me, the attention sickened me. Terrified me. Repulsed me in a way I cannot explain. Like my guts were twisting into a snake and regurgitating back out my throat. Wrapping itself in knots around my heart and lungs. Filling my body cavity and pressing against the inside of my ribcage. Suffocating me from the inside out. I would have died to stop the feeling. I would have killed myself had I not been paralyzed and relieved of all mental and bodily autonomy at that moment.

But now I feel lost without it. I am unseen again. Unnoticed. I would die to have it again. I would kill for it. This isolation I have lived in for so long. I was blind to it. As everyone was blind to me. But for a moment, I felt the attention. All of it. The good and the bad. I was loved and hated. I invoked fear and awe and disgust and wonder.

And it changed me.

For a moment I saw every emotion and feeling I had ever had within myself staring back at me from the outside. They seemed so much easier to understand on the faces of other people. Was this a moment of reflection? Was it the people in the corridor who noticed me? Or was it simply the first time I noticed myself?

As I stand here now after the fact, alone in the corridor, I can still feel the attention. But not coming from outside. Coming from within me. Whose attention it is, I cannot say. It does not feel like my own. But then again I have always had trouble understanding who I am. What I am. Even IF I am.

I was a solitary creature of habit and I am forever changed.