You know what I love about the Barnes and Noble cafe? It offers the opportunity to hear a dozen different conversations all at once. It’s possible to sit at a table with your earbuds plugged into your laptop (even though you’re not listening to anything) and eavesdrop on other people’s conversations while leaning back casually in your chair, sipping tea, and have absolutely no one suspect a thing because you’re the only one who can see your computer screen.
Yes, I’m one of those people.
I’m hopelessly distracted by the table to my right - they’re talking through different math equations, solving for x and y and other such variables. I’ve always loved equations, because they always have an answer. Though sometimes they end up ugly, like the cube root of (45/37)^2*(9y/78)^-(1/3), there is still an answer.
Across from me there are three girls allegedly doing “homework.” Calculators and books lie unused on the table. The girls sit and talk with their hands. They tilt their heads and play with their hair, they say “oh gosh, I can’t believe her” and “then he said…” They take pictures of each other sitting and talking with their hands and tilting their heads and playing with their hair.
It hurts to watch groups of girls like that, because they are me. I am them. I can lean back casually in my chair and think I’m above them because I’m not playing with my hair, but really, we are the same. We have the same fears, we get the same look in our eyes when someone talks over us, we act like we care when we don’t, we hide what we really care about.
It’s one of the most bizarre and beautiful things in the world, to look at someone and see yourself reflected in their face and in their manner and in the things they say. And when you see yourself in someone else, when you realize that we all live in the same skin, everybody gets a little bit more human to everyone else. That is, people begin to matter to each other.
And a girl across the room just fell off her chair. See, who hasn’t had moments like that?
Yes, I’m one of those people.
I’m hopelessly distracted by the table to my right - they’re talking through different math equations, solving for x and y and other such variables. I’ve always loved equations, because they always have an answer. Though sometimes they end up ugly, like the cube root of (45/37)^2*(9y/78)^-(1/3), there is still an answer.
Across from me there are three girls allegedly doing “homework.” Calculators and books lie unused on the table. The girls sit and talk with their hands. They tilt their heads and play with their hair, they say “oh gosh, I can’t believe her” and “then he said…” They take pictures of each other sitting and talking with their hands and tilting their heads and playing with their hair.
It hurts to watch groups of girls like that, because they are me. I am them. I can lean back casually in my chair and think I’m above them because I’m not playing with my hair, but really, we are the same. We have the same fears, we get the same look in our eyes when someone talks over us, we act like we care when we don’t, we hide what we really care about.
It’s one of the most bizarre and beautiful things in the world, to look at someone and see yourself reflected in their face and in their manner and in the things they say. And when you see yourself in someone else, when you realize that we all live in the same skin, everybody gets a little bit more human to everyone else. That is, people begin to matter to each other.
And a girl across the room just fell off her chair. See, who hasn’t had moments like that?
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