Thinking About You
16 Oct 2020Today’s prompt: “Suddenly, you can hear everyone’s thoughts, and you are shocked by what they think about you. Write their thoughts.”
We’re all a little narcissistic. We all think people think about us way more often than they do. On your last Zoom call, how much time did you spend obsessing about how you looked to other people? And how much time did you spend obsessing about how other people looked?
That’s a little beside the point now, of course. The fact is, since last Thursday, people haven’t even looked at you at all. You’ve walked past their houses and they continued taking out the trash and raking the leaves without so much as a glance at you.
You can hear what everyone thinks about you, and the silence is deafening.
You don’t get it at all. If you were them, you wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about the giant bloody gash in your forehead from where the axe hit you. I mean, you get why people wouldn’t want to look at it, or you. It’s ghastly. But you’d think there’d be a train wreck aspect to it. You’d think their minds would be going a mile a minute about it. Instead of thinking, “Man, it’s nice to finally stretch my legs today,” or “Ugh, this trash smells disgusting,” or “Please please please don’t let Molly see the squirrel OH GOD MY ARM.”
Maybe your mind is playing tricks on you. You poke the axe wound. Nope, it’s still there. A little sticky, maybe. Maybe things are coagulating a bit. But it’s got to be visible, right?
Your other neighbors are either still inside or taking their dogs for early walks, but Mr. Ferguson is outside with his newspaper and a cup of coffee. He turns to the obits, and scans the names. And then he looks at your house. And you hear his thoughts. “Didn’t they live right over there?”