Someone Else's Ocean

by Kate Stewart

“I mean, we are all just extras sipping coffee in the background of someone else’s life. But that could change at any second. If I wanted to, I could put my coffee down and become responsible for you. We are all responsible. We could all choose to take responsibility, couldn’t we? Human compassion. What the hell happened to that?”

THERE’S A NAME FOR HUMAN awareness and it’s called Sonder. The definition: the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground. It’s a pocket in time, where you may redefine life by the idea of the struggle of others.

Instead of continuing to live a life I couldn’t live, I chose me.”

And so, I’m here living someone else’s life, in someone else’s house staring at someone else’s ocean.”

“Be simple and do whatever the hell it is you have to do to make yourself happy.”

“Everyone is a glass house, it’s up to you to decide who to give the rocks to.”

“what’s inside of you is a heart that is dying to live, and your head is too afraid to let you do it fully, the way you deserve. It’s the most tragic thing I’ve ever seen. You’re a prisoner of your own making.”

I was weeks away from thirty years old and had just found my first love. And my soulmate. But not my forever.

She was my golden shore after the shipwreck that was my life and she’d loved me with her whole heart, only to let me break it.

Sometimes what’s meant to be isn’t written in the stars, instead, it’s a journey on the path less traveled without a map of guidance, without certainty.