What I Am, Part 4

I can see in an instant the size of your mind. Let me look at your eyes, read a paragraph you wrote, hear you speak. Then I know. It’s a very lonely gift. Why I should be 40 years dead by now. You’re not supposed to be alive for so long, the ones with mind eyes. How you look to me? You don’t want to know. But it’s not as harsh as you think.

You’re not little. You’re not ants. Many of you are beautiful. Think of a Fabergé egg. Or a whole gross of them.

Lovely. All of you. Every single one a work of art. Everything you do makes sense, in the context of your solitary unbroken shell. Spent my life admiring you all, one by one. Not looking down, though I know you all think so. Human beings are innately beautiful, even when they do ugly things. Women in particular. The level of detail, the intricacy. The self-consistency is breathtaking, always a work of art from princess to streetwalker. Men a different story but somehow exactly the same...

But you don’t believe me. I wouldn’t believe me either. The biggest weakness of the Smart Guy? His power is lost when he can’t recognize the Smarter Guy. Not a problem.

What if your mind is as big or bigger than mine? Haven’t seen it often, but I know instantly. I don’t get a picture. I get an invitation. We know each other, even across centuries and millennia. I’m in there with you, wandering and wondering.

The sad part. It usually hurts. The worst? Mozart and Poe. Both dead before 40. My mind is not bigger, just older, and maybe sorrowfully wiser. I walk in their beautiful darkly numinous forests, and I want to say, “Please go on living, please, we need you,” but I am cowed to silence. I am reduced to a whisper.

Shakespeare is a stage, boisterous, rowdy, ribald even, winking saucily in a dimension of his own. Blake a cathedral, every microscopic detail wrought by his own hands, from gargoyle spire to organ pipes, to timeworn hymnal in the pew, all by one hand. You are inside one leviathan mind, every particle glowing.

In this company, I am only a humble tourist. I have lived too long. That was my punishment. To learn that hubris is believing you can save anyone. It takes 50 years to learn you can’t. Save anyone. But maybe your own soul.

I will have learned what I was sent here to learn this time when I no longer fear dying on a grate in Philadelphia.

That would be you. Admire yourself.