Cocoon

The German woman who was kidnapped and kept in a guy's basement for 8 and a half years was just on Skavlan, you can see it on SVTPlay tomorrow probably. Strange somehow. Seeing her there, talking about it, its unimaginable what she went through and yet - she looks just like a normal woman.

We all do. Or, I should say, we look simply like people. It's so easy in movies or comics where people wear their scars or their powers on the outside, but that's not how it works in the real world. Or is there such a thing? If you looked properly into her eyes, would you see the pain she went through, would you see that thing they speak of in literature, where a person has gone through a great deal or seem older than they are? I think, to be honest, that that is only imagination, finding patters because we expect them, like seeing Jesus in a patch of dirt.

I think the patterns it makes is not in our faces or in our eyes or burned into our skin; it's softly ground into our person, into our behavior and characteristics, like a complex, three-dimentional puzzle by our gestures and our voices and every muscle that moves. They study brains to see if they can read the memories there, if like the rings of a tree one can read the history of a human in the mosaics of neurons, and perhaps. Perhaps that twitch is crafted to cover up a different twitch spawned long ago because of a mishap, and perhaps the story is written in our brains. But rather than that,

it is a wonder, isn't it? To be surrounded by all these people, to be enveloped in all this history, the pain and the laughs and the fortunes. The way the old woman by the bus stop hunches her shoulders, the corner of the mouth of the cashier, the hitch at the end of specific words when the tourist asks you for directions. It is all a part of their history, like hieroglyphs of their lives, that although we can't read them clearly, they all together form the weave that is the fate of our world - the past, the present, the future.

It is overwhelming. I saw this woman speak of her story, and all of this sort of washed over me, and I realized, it's not strange that I'm sometimes reluctant to go outside, to be among people even if I don't have to interact. They are interacting with me, all of them, with every movement and every glimmer of their eyes. I'm in a constant flow of information, like a million radio waves in foreign languages passing through me on every frequency, from every direction. And filtering it out is such a painful process, in many different ways. For who wouldn't want to try to understand the history of everything?