XIII- When you feel invisible
What does a mockingbird sound like? The answer, of course, is everything. It’s not beholden to any one song, any one sound, any cadence, any genre. Sparrow, bluejay, irritated crow, angry squirrel, car alarm…whatever it wants. You know it by the way it changes. That’s its power.
That’s also its dark side.
What does a mockingbird sound like? The answer is, of course, nothing. It doesn’t have a song of its own; it can only copy. It’s an amalgamation, a collection, but what’s making the sound? What does a mockingbird sound like if it can’t sound like anything else?
The older I get, the more the idea of ghosts terrifies me on an existential level, because I can vividly imagine what it’s like to be one. No one can perceive you except as a meaningless noise, a blip on a machine, a breath on the back of someone’s neck. You’re aware, but you can’t touch anything, affect anything. You exist…but you also don’t.
Some people worry about what other people think about them when they leave the room.
I worry I’m so unremarkable that people will forget me the moment I’m gone.
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Do other people have days where they feel acutely invisible?
Like, everyone seems to look past you. You say something, and no one seems to hear you. Nobody responds to your comments online…or worse, nobody responds to your comment, and the conversation picks right back up on the thread it was on before you said anything. Nothing you do or work on seems to take. Can’t make progress on anything. Simple things fail. It just feels like you’ve moved a step out of phase with the rest of reality, and all you can do is wait for the reset.
Just me?
I’ve had a lot of those days lately.
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I think I’m beginning to understand Alexander Hamilton’s obsession with legacy (or rather, the version of Hamilton envisioned in the musical bearing his name). If you believe, like I do, that there’s nothing after this…
Ok. “Believe” is a strong word. My official position is one that appears on the Sleep Token discord pretty often: “We know shit about fuck.” I’m a hard agnostic. We don't know what comes after. We, dare I say it, can’t know, at least with the tools currently at our collective disposal. We don’t have the capacity. Our senses are too unreliable, too easily tricked. We’re conditioned to see patterns where there are demonstrably none, primed to make order out of chaos even if said order isn’t real and we know it isn’t real. Ever looked at a magic eye image? Seen one of those spinning window optical illusions? Listened to that clip of people chanting at a sports event, where you can hear 5 different phrases quite clearly depending on which one you happen to be reading at the time? You know what’s happening. You experience your brain being tricked in real time, and yet you can’t see past the trick.
Do you really think we can possibly know what happens once all those senses shut down? No. We Know Shit About Fuck. And as much as I’d like to think we continue on after the mortal shell crumbles back to stardust…it’s unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely. I just…feel like we would know, beyond our highly trickable senses, that people persist beyond death outside our memories of them. We would know by now.
We would know. And the fact that we don’t is, to my mind, inescapably damning…and terrifying.
Maybe, as a species, we’ll have some kind of breakthrough someday and we’ll figure it out. Maybe individual people have figured it out. I can’t rule that possibility out; hell, I’d welcome it. I’m a fantasy nerd; I’m always looking past the horizon of what’s possible. I love the what-ifs, the unexplainable. This world is so big, so strange, and we know so little.
But the older I get, the more I see that encroaching event horizon and have to ask myself, “but what if this is all we get?” How do I want to be remembered, if that is truly all that will exist of me when I’m gone? What do I leave behind?
What is my legacy?
