I was walking behind this woman this morning on my way to work, and something about her — the nondescript way she dressed, the way she did her hair, and in particular the way she walked (a formless, loose-limbed kind of walk, with no sway or strut or swagger or purpose or, really, anything, even anything defiantly inelegant or uptight or whatever), suggested to me that there was just something terribly blah about her.
Not embarrassing, or pathetic, just blah. And I wondered, as I do sometimes, whether it’s possible that there are lots of people out there whose whole lives are just kind of blah. They love and grieve and worry and triumph, of course, but it’s all in an uninteresting, un-idiosyncratic way. Their thoughts are formulated for them by their families or spouses or the television. They say what they’re supposed to say in most situations. They have sex in the ways they’re expected to have sex. Their values are good but not exceptional, and they’re hypocritical in the typical ways. etc. etc.
It certainly seems, from the outside (which is to say, inside my head), that there are plenty such people. But then again, how could I really know? Even the ones I know I don’t really know. I’m not in their heads, in their bedrooms, a fly on the wall during their intimate conversations with their loved ones. Maybe their lives, beneath the facade they present to the world, each have their own beautiful, tragic distinctiveness.
