"sonder (n)- the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own- populated with their own friends, ambitions, routines...- an epic story that continues invisibly around you and in which you may only appear once, as an extra sipping coffee or a lighted window at dusk."
Coming to the city only fueled the fire in her heart. All the people, all the stories... Every click of a boot or heel upon the concrete represented a different thought, a different reason, a different purpose. So many people with so many problems and so many stories and so many thoughts and ideas and reasons for being precisely where they were; she wanted nothing more than to be one of them.
But the longer she stayed, and the longer she caught sight of all those people, the more in-depth she began to think about them. How many of those people were silently crying out for help right now? How many of these people had just survived a job interview, and gotten married, or adopted their first pet? How many of these people were drowning in a sea of their own disgusted thoughts and had convinced themselves that no one cared to help them out? How many of these people would end their own lives and remember her as only an ignorant passerby in the ultimate demise of their downward spiral of life, if even that? How could she help all of these people?
The answer to her innocent question, she knew, was that she couldn't possibly help all of them. She realized then that she was so accustomed to being known that she didn't notice how many people would never know who she was, that even if she made a difference in one person's life, not everyone would know who she was. It occurred to her suddenly that she would lead a simple life, a quiet existence in which she wasn't sure she was happy. The city seemed to grow larger that day- as if it wasn't large enough to her already.
The city that once set a yearning for newness inside her heart now held a new purpose: it was a constant reminder that she was one out of trillions, that no matter how many people knew her name, eventually ashes would turn to dust and her name would be a bittersweet memory that whispered soundlessly in the winds of change.
She was undeniably small, indefinitely pointless, condemned to normalness and the insanity of her wild conscious.
"All these people..." she had thought in absolute awe, "with so much to love and so much to live for. Do they realize how pleasantly different their lives are?"
But now, she realizes, she was a passerby to others. People wondered about how pleasantly different her life seemed from theirs of this city, confined to the work which they so carefully selected and the life they would give anything to change. They yearned to know her inner feelings, as she aspired to know theirs.
She would never know these people, and they would never know her; but they were both pleasantly different in their own bewildering ways, and she was okay with that.
