“What could I possibly talk about with such a face?”

For everyone I see who comes and goes along the road, I say inwardly: “What could I possibly talk about with such a face?” And I pass by dismissively, just as they do with me. If there had been someone otherworldly who dazzled my eye, I would have already gone to them. But nobody has ever drawn my attention in my whole life. Nothing that interests me interests people, and nothing that interests people interests me. I am in love with art and philosophy. Yet people—flat as a hollow body of water barely covering the ground beneath—provoke in me an allergic reflex rooted deep in my biology. Just as a person’s body releases pleasant hormones when embraced, I experience a constant headache in the presence of humans as though there is a equality between the two states. I have already grown accustomed to the feeling of my expectations hanging endlessly in the air. If there were someone capable of captivating my perception—even by the tiniest fraction, the size of a microbe—they would never escape my grasp. But it seems my frequency is always tuned elsewhere, or perhaps nowhere at all.