Liminal People

At any given moment, you are a loading screen in someone else's story. Present but not rendered. There but not processed.

We move through crowds like this constantly — a cacophony of existences brushing past each other on sidewalks, in stations, across intersections. Entire inner worlds in transit. And yet what matters most to each of us remains painfully singular: our grief, our joy, our problems, our lives.

There's something deeply disorienting about being perceived while carrying private catastrophes no one else can see. You see someone smiling while crossing a busy street and assume life must be treating them gently that day. But maybe the person scowling beside them has just lost something they cannot speak about yet. Maybe someone else nearby is holding back tears in the middle of rush hour because strength, somehow, has become a public performance.

Maybe we should be a little kinder.

Or a little more ignorant.

The other day, I saw a boy peeling boiled eggs on a bench in Sidney Smith Hall as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

At Union Station, I saw a man without eyelashes and he looked strangely unfinished, like a cartoon character someone forgot to fully draw.

And near Varsity Field, I looked at a boy for a second too long because my mind had wandered elsewhere, and he smiled at me like he had caught me returning from somewhere far away.

It feels strange that we are constantly brushing against other people at the exact center of their lives while remaining background characters in theirs. And yet we collect them anyway, these small vignettes, like we are trying to paper the walls of our own solitude with proof that other people are real.

The boy peeling boiled eggs was probably thinking about something entirely ordinary — an assignment due at midnight, a text he forgot to answer, whether he needed to buy groceries later. The man without eyelashes might have gone home that evening and become somebody's father or husband or friend instead of the strange passing figure I turned him into for thirty seconds in my head. And the boy who smiled at me near Varsity Field has probably forgotten the interaction entirely by now, while I am here writing it down like it meant something larger.

Meanwhile I had headphones in. Someone watching from across the street would have seen just a girl sealed off in her own world — not someone quietly accumulating strangers like pressed flowers, turning them over, trying to understand something about being alive.

Maybe that is what being human is. Making small myths out of strangers because we are desperate to feel connected to the worlds moving around us.

Maybe some of us spend our entire lives trying to prove to ourselves that other people are as real as we are.

April 30, 2026 | TASC, Niagara-on-the-Lake