On sleepless roads, the sleepless go

It’s weird how some days you just feel more alive than others. Or days you feel more or less willing to be alive than others. I guess that’s what happens when you get to thinking. I accept the fact that my life is unremarkable, to say the most. It honestly perplexes me that the majority of people think their lives are truly significant from the other billions of lives there are. Or that they themselves are truly significant. Somewhere, millions of other people are going through the same exact things you are right now. Everybody lives their life almost exactly the same. People you pass on the street or drive by in your car are falling in love (or thinking they are), dealing with a breakup, having a fight with a friend or significant other, worrying about final exams and being excited about summer. But they’re not really people if you don’t know who they are, are they? They’re just nameless faces. They might as well be ghosts. But they all have their own lives, and friends, families and worries. I walk through the aisles in the grocery store and wonder who is having a bad day, or who just got fired, or who just lost a loved one, or who is wondering how they’re going to just make it through the week. And I wonder if they’re wondering the same things I am about the lives of everyone else around them, or if they’re just too concerned with their own to bother. I wonder if people think about offering a smile to a stranger on the off-chance that it might be all they really needed that day. And I also wonder about all those people who actually needed something like a smile from a stranger, but didn’t get one. And it was enough to make them lose hope and decide that there really is nobody who cares. I wonder if those people show up in the obituaries in the newspapers a few days later and are recognized by those strangers as the nobody they paid no mind to. I wonder if they feel guilty and start thinking that maybe they could have done something. What if they HAD done something like offering a smile or a polite conversation to a nobody? Maybe then they wouldn’t have felt like just a nobody anymore and they wouldn’t be in the obituaries. What if that person was a somebody instead of a nobody? Everyone has a somebody in their life who could use a smile right now, but they probably get ignored as if they were a nobody too. It’s weird how it works that way.
There’s a song by Jimmy Eat World called Hear You Me that I’ve been listening to a lot today. “What would you think of me now? So lucky, so strong, so proud. I never said ‘thank you’ for that. Now I’ll never have a chance.” Funny how people never appreciate who they have until they’re gone. And then all they’re left with is what they didn’t do, and what they should have done. They never think about those kinds of things until it’s too late. How convenient.

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