Safety First

I forget that the people around me have little universes inside them — that they are little rocket ships with worries, successes, infatuations, love and failures.

It's not entirely my fault. I've been sedated by what I've been born into. 

I speed down the highway 110 km's/hr, focusing on the middle path between the yellow line and the ditch. The cars coming toward me at a deaths pace are an abstraction. There presence is noted, crucial and distant. 

I can't ever touch them and must keep my distance.

The automobile and the two lane highway, I am convinced, has changed how I view the strangers around me. 

Like the vehicles that come at us at nauseam, the people we see in public spaces are abstractions, they are distant —they aren't really human to us. They are just there.

This perspective is polarizing and cold. Yet, it's safe.

If we open our eyes past our narrow lane, we may drift into someone else's lane and you know what happens then?

Splat. 

That got messy really quick.

It's much easier and safer to just ride it out in your own lane, while texting and driving and listening to Miley Cyrus.

But, that's just plain wrong and makes that holes in our hearts even bigger.