6:4:22

Kids look at me a lot lately--on the street, in elevators. They look me in the eye the way grown ups, whose eyes are always firmly lost in phone screens, don't. It makes me feel special, seen. But I see them too. I see what they could be, might be. Are. Their powers of perception, connection.

The black boy on the crowded subway yesterday looked like he was from a movie about a world that doesn't exist anymore. Even his vaguely 80s clothes. Not the stupid Normie 80 clothes that people wear reflexively now, to signal surface throwbacks that mean nothing; impoverishing even the historical value and meaning of fabric and cloth, on a body in time, but like he was an actual time traveller from this world I used to live in. The world I come from.

The boy was beautiful, still, contemplative, solitary. No mask, no iPhone. Looking, sleepy, sleeping.

Maybe 14, maybe 15.

Our eyes met a couple of times.

Maybe he wants a phone but isn't allowed to have one, and that's why he's sad. Maybe I am wishfully reading into what is actually just some kind of teenage boredom. Anomie. Mask. But nevertheless I could see the difference because he didn't have a phone. So all his affects and expressions were different, preserved. Deeply human.

The people who are different always look different.

That's what's missing now. That look of difference.

That's what the unmasked kids still have too.

There's almost no magic or curiousity in children now, so I'm happy when I see it.