Sometimes when I look at the maze of buses in front of me I start seeing them not as dots and arrows and trailing tails, or as frustrating pixels that won't go when I tell them to, or stop when I tell them to, but the road as it is as the driver sees it. At this moment every driver is scanning the road, listening to their bus whine and hiss out its air brakes. The drivers are bouncing in their seats as they speed over potholes and bob to their music. This is all happening right now. HOP 15, who's that, it's P., is about to climb Folsom Hill. This is his reality, leaning over his wheel, spinning it, listening to his gears shifting under his feet. R. on 18 is starting the long quick ascent up Pearl Street, and maybe he's got a crazy passenger, because R. always does, and he has to try and figure out how to respond to this guy's random sputterings of rage as he scans the road, trucks, bikes, the rising sun shining in his rearview. This is his reality. D. on 13. How does his speeding feel to him? I see his tail stretching all the way down 9th, but he's in his bus feeling something else, abandon maybe, or maybe just eagerness to finish his shift, even though it's only 7:20 am, and his foot heavy on the accelerator. This is his reality. All of this, all of these realities, at the same moment.

I lose myself in thoughts of 'this is someone's reality' a lot, and can spend hours with my cheek propped in my hands, thinking, someone is giving birth right now, they're screaming and in the most indescribable pain and they are thinking, this is the most important moment of my life. Somewhere this is happening and it's so all-consuming that everything else is shut out, and I'm sitting here with my face in my hands feeling nothing. Somewhere someone is throwing up, and their throat is seizing, their breath catching on the uptake and heaving, and they're crying out of sheer misery, thinking only, over and over, make it stop make it stop make it stop. And I am sitting here with my face in my hands, feeling nothing.

I listen to hippies say 'everyone is connected' and I think of this and think, no, they're not. We'd be getting twinges all the time, or terror, of pain, of bliss, of shame, we'd see masses of humanity moving, on the streets of New York maybe, and have to push through everyone's issues along with their bodies. It would be unbearable. And I know that it's more complicated than that, collective knowledge and such, all those studies about a handful of people coming up with the exact same unprecedented theory at the exact same time. And also that connected doesn't have to mean tuning into everybody in the world, it can also mean something as simple as talking to someone and being able to feel what they feel based on having the same physical experiences of something emotional. Your throat narrowing, closing up, the resulting tightness in your chest. Something whirling behind your eyes, a clenching at your temples. Anxiety. We share these physical effects and we can put them together into a word, and then we think we feel what someone else feels, though of course we never really know. The corners of your mouth tug upwards and you feel flooded with buoyancy, a feeling not unlike being in water, and we call it happiness and we laugh together. We think we're feeling the same thing, but we don't know. And with happiness, we really don't care. It's obvious that we want to keep it going, and that's enough.

But it still doesn't help me stop being overwhelmed by the six and a half billion people in the world, all having experiences, right now, at this moment, feelings all over the spectrum, most of them more intense that I have ever felt or probably will ever feel, and I think, how can this fit, how can we all fit, not just space-wise, or food-wise, not how can we feed this many people, house this many people, clothe this many people, of course that too, but most of all, how can the world squeeze in so much intensity of emotion without bursting?

The earth's crust could crack and the atmosphere tighten and shoot out of puncture holes in the ozone made by the knives of this anguish, this joy, this drivel, and I think I can honestly say that I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised. I would watch it and be relieved that this actually existed, every time I would lose myself for hours thinking about it, it was happening. Everyone was bursting at the seams at the same time and it was too much for the world, just like it was often too much for me.