Pantomiming
an excerpt

“Think of all the people…” I breathed towards Brennan.

“Hmm?”

“Each one of those lights belongs to a different person… each different person has their own lives… think of all the lives in this one city. Think of all the problems and the happiness, all the success and the failure, all the dreams fulfilled and crushed…” I mused.

He contemplated that thought, before nodding resolutely. “Yeah… but think of them all working together to create that,” he nodded towards the show of lights. “Don’t you think you should view them as a whole, a unity of conflicts and accomplishments? After all, if only one of them had their lights switched on, we wouldn’t see this. We’d see an insignificant dot in the distance; we wouldn’t view it as one life. But when we see a harmonious glow of millions of little lights, we see it as a united force. We see the whole picture, not a small fraction. We don’t recognize a single dot, we see them connected.”

I blinked lethargically, “Mm… you know… you’re actually right… If only we could see the world as a land of individuals, though. Rather than a communal population. Don’t you think that would be better?”

He sighed thoughtfully, “In some ways, yes. But in others… no. It would help to think of ourselves as one world, fighting against a larger force, rather than smaller forces imbedded in us fighting each other. Instead of thinking of ourselves as ‘England,’ and ‘Korea,’ and ‘United States,’ maybe we should say, ‘Earth.’”

The bus rumbled to life and drove away, past the Philadelphia skyline and back onto the highway.

“I suppose…” I mumbled, suddenly feeling exhausted. “I suppose you’re right, then.”

With that, my head hunched over to support itself on the window, and my eyes fluttered shut, my only working sense hearing, as I took in the sounds of the gravelly road and honking, the rumble of the engine and Brennan’s soft, rhythmic breaths.

I dreamt about empty, abstract fields and colors swirling around in warm pools of light. If I examined everything meticulously, I could see the miniscule dust-size spots that made up everything. Everywhere I went, everything was supported by tiny dots of light and color. If I looked from afar, the landscape appeared to be solid and concretely built, but upon impulse, I scooted closer to everything, examining the small building blocks of the world around me. It wasn’t anything real – it was simply a mosaic of colors and snaked patterns. Even the pure black, barren land was made of fleetingly microscopic spots. I would have called them trivial, perhaps, meager, insignificant, but I knew that if I pulled simply a couple out, the structure of the dream world I was in would tumble down unevenly. Maybe it would take more than a few – but eventually, they would be the consequential part of the system. With each particle that vanished, it would throw the world into even more distress, and soon enough, it would all collapse around me.