Sometimes I find myself thinking about someone I passed along the street many years ago. Sometimes it’s a specific encounter, sometimes it’s just the population of a time in my mind. Walking by someone and thinking, “I’ve never seen that person before, and I will most likely never see them again.” That used to strain my mind quite a bit. I don’t know if it was a more specific feeling of FOMO or a meaningless quarrel I would have with myself.
To be honest, it used to stir me. The idea that a person could enter my life for just a split second and vanish without leaving anything more than the acknowledgement that they were once there. I know it’s a futile and fruitless idea, but thinking about it would leave me feeling small and, to an extent, worthless. I pass by more people that I never think about again than the contrary, so that must mean the same for me, right? I would sit and wonder how little of an impact I’ve had on all the people I’ve ever met. Have I had an impact on people’s lives? I’d assume so. But, surely there are more people to whom I mean nothing than not.
There’s one instance of this in particular that I think began this way of thinking in me. I took a daytrip with some friends, and we were returning late at night. I had taken country roads out of habit and familiarity. It was late enough that, for the most part, the roads were entirely vacant. I would pass a car every few miles, and think nothing of it. But, on a long bend in the road, a truck approached. I remember it had it’s high beams on. As it passed beside my car, I glanced towards the driver. I didn’t see them at all, only the blur of the vehicle followed quickly by the cornfields that straddled the road. That ought to mean nothing at all, it’s not as if anything happened to make that occurrence stand out more than any other, but it did. For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea that I never saw that person’s face, I never actually knew they were there. In some way that person never actually existed for me. Their proof of being was never revealed to me.
It struck me with some great carnal fear that someone could blip in and out that quickly and I have nothing by which to remember them. I never thought of it from the other side. I never thought of what they thought of me in that moment. By all regards I’m sure they didn’t. I’m sure, like 99% of other people in that moment, I wasn’t even a thought for them. But, that doesn’t irk me at all, only the fact that I cared about it. Why did that moment, which will end up being a fraction of a fraction of a percent of my total life, mean so much to me? I don’t know. Maybe I will at some point in the future, but for right now I accept the fact that I just don’t know.
Grub's Dirt 