extras & spider webs
We were stopped at a traffic light in downtown and a crowd was walking in the crosswalk in front of us, with some jostling, some hurrying, some lollygagging.
I thought how they were all part of a whole and yet so separate. I said to him, "You know, all the people in the crosswalk, each with different lives, unconnected, they don't really exist in your world, but, in one second, something can happen and, then, they would suddenly be part of your life, your journey, your story."
"That's an interesting thought," he said. "They are like extras. It's like all the people you don't know are extras in your life."
"Yes," I said, "but at any moment, with one engagement--at a bus stop, because of a car accident, or if one were to grab the purse of another and take off running--suddenly, someone wouldn't be an extra anymore. You would be in each other's stories."
He said, "Like two people in a bookstore, reaching at the same moment for the same book, both hands on it at the same time."
"Exactly. Each person was at a different point on the xy axis, or maybe there's even 100s of different axis but for simplification, let's say there's an x and a y. And, in what seems like a completely random moment, these two journeys, having until that moment never crossed, suddenly move along x and y and share the same point. The two parallel universes touch. And suddenly, they are no longer extras in each other's journeys. No one is just a point on a grid. Now, for however brief, they share the story."
"In college," he said, "My friends and I decided there were only 120 real people in the world and the rest were actors."
For the rest of the ride to the hospital, I saw people walking with balls of yarn, and as they walked their yarn would stretch out behind them, and these soft, wooly, singular lines of colored yarn were crossing with the lines of others, sometimes tangling, sometimes tugging on each other, sometimes crossing but not touching at all, one above the other by a few inches.
Hours later, I find myself thinking about spider webs. Both the perfectly arranged spider webs that look like the bones of snowflakes, and the scattered, holey, unattractive spider webs of spiders who are part of a drug experiment. And I'm curious now, if we could see my idea of the yarn from space -- would it look like a complete mess or would it stretch out between us all, beautiful and purposeful? And would that tell us if there's such thing as fate?
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