These People That I See

            These people that I see, I’m beginning to think that I don’t really see them, you see?  They just don’t act like they are able to be seen by anyone else, and everyone else acts as though they can’t see the people, so all I have is the assumption that the things I think are there really are nowhere.

            Some things come from nowhere, though, don’t they?  I hear about them every once in a while. Like ‘That car came out of nowhere and just hit me!’, or ‘Then Jake came out of nowhere and spooked the shit out of those little kids!’.  In either case, something came from nowhere, which seems impossible if you don’t think about it too much, but then it has to be somewhere, right?

            It’s like the number zero.  Most people would say that 0 is a number, but it has no value. It’s the physical manifestation of nothing, making nothing into something.  If you have 0 apples, then you have no apples, but you also don’t owe anyone apples, like if you had -2 apples, and being bereft of apples is definitely considered by everyone that isn’t a pecan tree to be its own sovereign state of being.

            With this in mind, perhaps the people that I see are truly there, only in the respect that they are not there in most ways other than that they are symbols for nothingness.  What substance do they have? I can’t tell, they won’t really talk to me.  No one else interacts with them, so I can’t get anyone else to verify what I’m seeing, or that they are seeing me.  They look at me, sure, and sometimes they communicate with me nonverbally.  A nod as one man sits down in an ER waiting room, a shaking head of a woman leaning against a window sill at the pharmacy, and they see only me.  What if I am nothing, and yet simultaneously serve as a meeting point between two realities that don’t acknowledge the existence of each other?  In both at the same time, but not wholly in either one?  Who’s to say?  There is nothing here, but what is the nothing? Am I observing it, or am I the nothing being observed?  I’ve asked my hands, they don’t know.  No one else knows, either.  The people on the bus have looked at me enough times for me to know that they think I’m crazy, but which side are they on? Do I even have a side?