It is unsettling to read something that says what I have never dared to put into words. It happens again and again, though not often; every time it catches me off-guard.

Some part of me realizes, albeit only after a few missed beats, that I have not told anyone I also feel as the author felt, that I do understand it just so, that such thoughts have also lived in my mind like some silent, exiled dragon. No one knows that, my rational mind states, rolling its eyes.

Still, I feel stripped and exposed – my hands fly to cover the most vulnerable parts of my being and a cry escapes my lips, despite the desperation to appear composed.

We all fight tiny battles that drain us but have never quite earned the right to be mentioned – the pain at the top of your second toe on the right foot due to some weird cut ages ago; the ache you harbour from that one moment you realized you meant something less than you thought you did to someone you loved; the gradual, expanding, constant dread of wasting your time chasing field mice instead of antelopes. Such skirmishes cut us, shame us, become part of us. They make us more human than many have shown us they were comfortable witnessing – they break the grand illusion of the whitewashed, public-ready “they” and “the other,” and force those around us to see us as individuals with stories and songs and scars different from the ones they have.

We also fear to see them thus. One glimpse into another’s darkness, and we shrink back from the encounter, the second date, the entire relationship. The knowing forces us out of neutrality – instead of generally railing against humanity’s sin like some prophet on a soapbox on the corner of Yonge and Dundas in downtown Toronto, you watch the face of a friend or stranger crumple up in anger or shame or pain from words you suddenly wish you have never said.

Sure, there are different levels of relating. One treats their family as loved ones (I hope), which is not the same as they relate to the cheerful pastry-baker down the road, nor the stressed customer on the other side of the counter. But when one sees the person and not the imposed upon, the perils of caring and disappointment and love emerge – the grand kaleidoscope of the human experience springs into piercing existence – we are forced to be honest and true, real.

I wonder if there is any deeper psychological desire than to be seen and acknowledged…along the same vein, I wonder if there is any deeper fear and apprehension.

That is what makes art indestructible — at least one of the things, I think. As long as humans remain and communication exists, there shall be more to words than just ink on the page, more to paintings than colors on canvas, more to music than notes sounding one after another. There shall be that sacred sense of shared habitation, a place in thought and time to belong to, those lines of existence — mine and yours — somehow intersecting (even if only for a moment) to say:

I see you.