Fly on the Wall

There’s a customer assistance staff member pushing a man in a wheelchair through the airport. I overhear a small snippet of their conversation. It’s about how the man may not be able to walk at all within a year, so he figured he should travel while he can. The same man sits in my line of vision at the airport gate. He’s wearing a short-sleeved button-down vacation shirt that screams that he can still be the life of the party. And yet, the struggle of movement is clear on his kind, tired face when he tries to move from the bench to his chair.

I’m reading a book at the bar of an airport restaurant, halfway done with my pizza and lemonade. A woman sidles up to a man she clearly finds attractive. She doesn’t introduce herself. She just dives into flirtatious small talk. The man talks to her to be polite, or maybe to pass the time before his flight to Buffalo. She eagerly shares about the trip she was just on, then overshares about her income and her mother’s recent death. He laughs and comforts at all the appropriate spots, allowing her to feel seen in a way she needs on this commuting night.

There’s a couple in the seats behind me in the boarding area. It’s a private conversation that no one is meant to overhear. But the back of my head is only inches away, and I can’t push them out of the frame. They’re arguing about love and fidelity, their youth juxtaposed with the adult in their words. At least one of their childhoods ended too soon. A boy turned grown up before he was old enough to drive. There’s fear hiding in the silence between heated sentences. Fear of what happens if they commit to each other, and fear of what happens if they don’t.

I like these little moments. The moments when we’re no more than a fly on the wall. When we’re just an extra in someone else’s scene. We’re not meant to distract from the action or have any lines. We’re simply part of the background.

I’m sitting at a table in a coffeeshop in my neighborhood. I’ve got my work spread all around me and I’m facing the rest of the cafe. Two men meet for coffee at a table nearby. Their words are formal and mostly a dull murmur, like a business meeting between two relative strangers. But then a few words break through. Struggle. Sponsor. Fear of relapse. It’s the man who’s back is to me that’s opening up, to someone ready to help hold him up. I never see his face.

After the two men leave, two younger men replace them at the table. They arrive separately. I can’t quite decide if they’ve ever met in person before this day. Over coffee, they talk about video games and conspiracy theories. Their words meander to reliving moments of life in high school and strong opinions about politics. They talk about the work that goes into starting a business, and the rising cost of country land far from the city. One guy might be a bit paranoid. He’s the loud talker, but his eyes are constantly darting to me and every other table.

My presence adds filler, completing the aesthetics of a moment in time. Depending on the sharpness of a future memory, the rest of us in the cafe could be human-shaped blurs, or we could be perfectly defined. Maybe we aren’t even in the memory. We were just a prop in the background that never registered for the main characters at all.

I’m running on the path along the river in an east coast city. It’s a warm fall evening, just before sunset. There’s a pier-shaped park to my left with an upper and lower path. There’s a security guard blocking foot traffic on the lower path, so I detour on the upper path instead. At the end of park on the lower path there’s a wedding ceremony. The background in photos and memories will be the bridge, the calm surface of the river, and a cotton candy sky. There won’t even be a glimpse of a girl out for an evening run after a long day.

We spend so much time as the main character in our own stories. We’re center stage, always in the middle of the action. It’s easy to get caught up in that. We get so caught up that we often forget how many other stories are being told all around us. But then we recognize a scene where we’re nothing more than filler in the background. It’s a scene that helps us zoom out.