Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn
And I see them for what they are.
Be grateful you don’t have to hear the thoughts spewing from putrid human brains. You might be surprised that the rot is so pervasive that even the kindest face becomes monstrous once you get a stream of the words behind the smile.
What the hell are you looking at? the man across the street thinks when I catch his eye. Then he hurries along, late for a meeting that started twenty minutes ago, all the fury aimed outward. He reminds me of a pot of water foaming and getting ready to boil over.
Only feet away, a woman with a baby stroller glances at me and then away: in that flash of a moment, I know what she thinks of me and what dances behind her fluttering eyelids. She sees my long face, the tan of my skin, and the facial hair I haven’t trimmed in a few days. Through her eyes, I remind her of a man who hit her until she lay curled on a bathroom floor, her nose bloody and two front teeth loose.
I let my eyes drift away even as I feel her fear as if it were electricity sparking against my skin. Only when she’s passed me do I allow myself to take a halted breath. Then I look up at a sky littered with the beginning of storm clouds.
I pass twenty or thirty more people on my way, and glimpses of their thoughts intrude like errant gossip from nosy neighbors. The worst of it is the shrouded pall of anger — so many people feeling like they are meant for more even as others try to crush them underfoot. I’ve only walked a few blocks from my apartment building, and already my head is throbbing from the weight of it all.
I try to remember what my therapist said — you can’t control the world, you can only control yourself — but she didn’t know the half of it, did she? And I always had trouble focusing during my appointments because her own depression was stifling, nearly choking me, every time I saw her for three months worth of sessions. Eventually, I had to stop going because I saw the futility of it: how could she help me when she couldn’t even help herself?
The average person might think mind-reading was a great superpower — but can you imagine the logistics of it all? I can barely go into a grocery store for a brief fifteen-minute stint to get the…
