Lift your head up and look around.

I saw you glance at the man next to us. The one with the headphones plugged into nothing. His defiant act telling the world, no matter what is happening, I am off limits.

“Human interaction,” he’d say. “That’s a hard pass for me.”

Then I looked at you for a moment. If I’m being honest, it was longer than a moment, so hopefully it wasn’t creepy. But I guess I wasn’t worried about you noticing me, because you never looked up to acknowledge the world. The man next to us may have been shouting through his demonstration, but you sat there like everyone else and did it passively.

I imagined talking to you. Getting your attention, telling you what I’ve learned, and asking for your help. I would put your mind at ease by telling you that I know who you are, because I was you not too long ago. I wanted you to know that we only have a short window, and as much as we think we are invincible, at some point we are going to lose the thing that we should value most in this world. People.

But I didn’t do any of that. I sat there clutching my backpack, tapping my foot, and watched as you got off at your stop and someone else took your place. This time around they didn’t even see the man next to them with the headphones plugged into nothing, because they were too engrossed in their game of Candy Crush.

I didn’t even know that game was still a thing. This is going to be harder than I thought.