HumorIs – Adam Overland

I live on a busy street

A thousand cars a day or more must drive past my house. I hear them from my perch in the living room. If the cars are mechanically sound, they go by with little more than a whoosh, almost like a gust of wind. Sometimes I hear a loud stereo, a low rumble of bass causing some loose part of a vehicle to vibrate its annoyance. Every once in a while, an ambulance. A honk from a disgruntled driver.

But in the evenings, as traffic wanes you can close your eyes and relax as the interval of the whoosh expands. You can close your eyes and wait for the wheels and the displaced air and it’s almost like breathing. Sometimes it seems like anything can be beautiful. Sometimes it seems like everything.

A thousand people a day or more must drive past my house in a thousand cars, each with a windshield, seeing this world with their own eyes. They float along at speeds just inches above the pavement, tucked inside a moving manufactured space, accelerating towards and from, towards and from some place. They are going to. They are coming from.

Nowhere are our worlds more ours than within that inner world behind closed eyes, where everything that has ever been for each of us has registered and made us who we are.

And so some of us will drive past my house and go home and call our mothers. Some will put their children to bed. Some will make love. Some will just make dinner. In a perfect world. But this is this world. This is all worlds, behind all eyes.

And so in this world some of us will also drive past my house and drink until we pass out because life is too much to be awake for anymore. Some of us will kick their dog because there is no love left for themselves or anyone in this world. Some of us may hurt their children, for which there is no excuse but what horrors brought them here. Some who drive past my house will think only of themselves. In doing so, they forget themselves. They forget that they are not the only ones. A thousand times a thousand times a thousand worlds.

The only hope is that if yours is a good world, that you bring it into the light. Out from behind your eyes where we can see it too and show the many worlds what a world can be.

I live on a busy street.