Bangkok

I don’t know why I have to be every person at the same time but it has happened. I don’t know why I have to feel everyone’s feelings. I have become the world. I don’t know why I have to shoulder this burden. I don’t know why that at any one time I have to be every single person simultaneously, second-guess everyone’s motivations and instincts. I don’t know why I have been made responsible for the world.

I think it is too much for one person to bear to have to know exactly what every single person in the world is thinking at any one time, at this particular time. It is a horror beyond horrors. I think it is beyond the realms of acceptability to have to be confronted with all this pain and this trouble, because trust me so much of what people think is just trouble. I think that it is unfair of who ever made me to put me in a position in which I have to understand everything that every human being is saying to themselves at any one time, and not only now but what they’ve always said and thought all the way down the line from the beginning of time.

When I compare myself to what I was in the luxury of my ignorance, when I was exclusively me, when I didn’t have to put myself in everyone’s shoes at literally the exact same moment in time, then I cannot believe that things were so easy and I didn’t have to care at all about what other people felt or thought, every last tiny thing that goes through their system, and I wonder if I will ever be able to recapture that benighted place of seclusion and calm. When I compare myself to what I was, I think of when and how I never gave a jot for anyone else’s thoughts or feelings and that it was so tidy and clean but also somehow a little stifling and closed off. When I compare myself now to how it was, it was like flying alone in a two-seater propeller versus being cheek to jowl in economy on a Dreamliner to Bangkok.

When you are every person at one time you cannot really hide. When you are every person you cannot exclude yourself and bask in your selfishness. When you are every person you have to care, because you are that person and the fact that they are not you makes only the slightest difference, it is only really a notional thing based on the separateness of the bodies still -- because I am not literally everyone’s body, how could I possibly be — it just means that everyone’s problems are your problems too.

I don’t really know when or how it happened. It wasn’t a sudden thing. It wasn’t as if they just plugged me in and I changed. Now I am the world, it’s as if I’ve always been everyone and that nothing did change and that I have always inhabited every single person on this earth, that I have always felt every last tiny sensation they’ve felt, that I have always been privy to their thoughts, every single thought really of every person I ever brushed shoulders with (and also didn’t), it’s as if nothing has changed at all, and/or that I never knew or realised that it had been like this all along and that I had been and always was responsible for the world. I cannot point to any single instant or moment when I became the world, so it must have happened in my sleep or I must have forgotten.

And then when you are every person at any one time, when you know what each one is thinking, it’s not as if it doesn’t hang together. I mean it seems, doesn’t it, that the thoughts of every other person in the world together might not make a whole lot of sense, might fold in on themselves and get curled up at the edges, what with the breadth and depth of what billions of people can think and feel at any one time in all the corners of the planet, it might seem that you couldn’t get a handle on it and that you’d get confused or overawed, but it’s the complete opposite and you find that every thought is cogent and that you fully understand them, not that the thoughts are in the least bit helpful, but you understand them nonetheless, every last feeling is familiar, but it’s just that all these billions of thoughts at once do get a tad trying, it’s like trying to balance a hundred plates on your nose, or juggling sheets of balsa in the wind, it’s like you can do it but it’s just bothersome and feels like it could all falter and fall apart at any one time.

But somehow you make it through. I made it through. Somehow I perpetuate the juggling act, though I have absolutely no choice. Somehow I manage to continue to be every single person at the same time without falling apart or being obliterated or exploding or going up in a puff of smoke, somehow the thoughts and the feelings keep coming all at one time, all at this very moment relentlessly, steadily, unerringly.

And though I continue, I don’t see there to be any purpose, any end goal. And then after all, what am I supposed to do with a million trifling fancies? Should I make a big cake? There isn’t so much you can do and how would you order it and how much of each bit would you need to put in? And then what would happen if I suddenly reverted back to me as I used to be, left behind with all these things that I hated and spurned, all things so separate and superfluous and so not me, and imagine how desperate you would be to cast them all away, to get rid but right at the moment you had so much of the stuff on your hands.