just a series of blurs, like I never occured

Do you ever feel like you're the only person in the whole world?

Not, exactly, like the world revolves around you. You're still a tiny, finite, ephemeral person-speck on the face of an enormous blue planet in a massive universe that doesn't really care one way or the other about your star, let alone your species or yourself. It's not a feeling of importance like that.

No, it's more like feeling that your life is a book and you are the author, or the main character; it is only around you that the words unfold. Though events may occur in between the lines and during chapter breaks and off the page, what is truly there, what exists is what you read--what you see. The only things that I know for sure exist are the things that I am looking at, feeling, and thinking about at this second.

Perhaps that is that same feeling of importance, I don't know.

I felt like that yesterday on the bus going to our band competition; when I closed my eyes for a second the entire universe blinked into blackness. Every car we passed, every little old man crossing the street, every bicycle-rider--their life stories seemed only to exist for the brief moment that they flashed past, only because I gave them my attention, and then disappearing again into the abyss only to be called up again when I looked.

Sort of like minimizing a window on a computer. Where does it go to? The computer is certainly not wasting energy rendering it visually for the benefit of no viewer. It is gone until I look at it again.

I was playing on the bus, what I term in my head the Literary Game, in which I attempt to describe the things I see, hear, sense in a rather flowery descriptive literate style, and see which things lend themselves well to description as such. Certain people, objects, and places (regardless of beauty) just must be captured in words; I feel like I'm collecting things, descriptions of things, that I may write into something some day. I remember things best when they're in words, anyway.

For instance, I remember the thin, bored-looking blond woman at the intersection; one hand resting lazily on the steering wheel, the other on the windowsill, cigarette dangling from her fingers. And in my current solipsistic mindset, this is the only moment she ever existed; and if that verbal snapshot were not etched into my memory, she would never have existed at all.

It is a bizarre place my mind goes to, this pseudo-solipsism, and it can be quite happy or quite sad. It is happy when you see a baby smile, as I did yesterday, in a nearby car while staring at us mysterious band kids trundling past in our big yellow bus. (I suspect, though, that every philosophy makes one happy when you see a baby smile.) It is sad when you read the news and feel that you must read every horrible story, note every soldier's name, because it is only you who remembers them and they deserve to be remembered.

I know I'm not the only person in the world. But I am the only person that I am referring to when I say "I," and that is almost the same. I am one point of view out of many, but I'm the only one that I get to experience. My world, if not the world, is of course just a compilation of snapshots, each one my experiences; and my world is the only world I can have.

Our band concert for a moment erased this feeling of aloneness; music does that, a bit. You are simultaneously at your seat, playing, and in the booming bass note of the tuba, on the tinny muted wail of the trumpet, concentrated at the tip of your conductor's baton. If the bus ride gave me a sense of being alone, the concert gave me a sense of being...I dunno. Not many, just...spread out. Blended together. Something.

The bus ride back was strange. Fog, thick fog, of the sort that things just appear out of the mist, startlingly close by, stay for a moment, and then disappear into the clouds as if they'd never existed at all, as if they no longer did. I couldn't see any street signs to tell my dad how close we were. There aren't any signs, I said. There aren't any.

Mmm.

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In other, less rambly news, I got accepted to MIT? I keep telling people that with a question mark, as if I'm not really sure if it's some sort of prank, yet. haha.