Lodestone
There are over 1400 biochemical stress responses ranging from behavioral, to physical, to psychological. It is said that the things we see in comics and movies–thew so called super powers are dreamed up ways that people wish they could respond to stress. A lot of things ‘are said’ and I often wonder who it is that is saying them. I wonder who ‘they’ are that gets in everyones head and helps us to maintain this shared hallucination of a reality. I wonder if ‘they’ are like me. I suspect that they must be in some fundamental way, just as I suspects there are more people like me. I know this because I’ve read the stories. I’ve seen the many pieces of fiction in cultures dating back to before BC. I’ve felt ways I know I should not be feeling, but I’ve never found the source. I’ve never found another one of us.
Sorry. I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Solomon Jackson and I have a very serious problem.
I was born in New York City. I only lived there for a short time. I remember the tall buildings and all of the people. I remember walking around as fast as I could among all of it and never being able to keep up. My mom would carry me down flights of stairs into the bright tunnels of the subway where it smelled like my diapers used to smell when she didn’t change them for a very long time. Down there people would stand in these tunnels and sing or play music or dance on a sheet of cardboard, always pointing to an open cup when they were done. When the train came it drowned them out with sound and people and I would get swept up in the wave. My mom would hold on to me or sit me on a bench high where I could see above their waists and she could see me and feel safe.
I hated this. I hated going down into the tunnels. in spite of how large they were and how small I was I always felt trapped. I always felt like everyone was watching me, if not with their eyes then with another secret part of themselves, knowing I was there and hating me for it. When I closed my eyes I could imagine them moving around me as a swarm, each individual leaving a small part of themselves in the space I filled and I would collect that part of them. It wasn’t until I was in fourth grade and Mrs. Miller did her unit on magnetism that I built a frame of reference for what was happening. In that class shw showed us a metal egg. She laid the egg down in a bed of paperclips and rolled it around. The paperclips stuck to the egg, building a shell around it. That is how the emotions that people left on me would would stick to me.