Someone Else's Ocean

by Kate Stewart

“One day I will get over him.” “You will,” I assured. “It’s okay to enjoy yourself.” Jasmine chewed the inside of her cheek. “What if I can’t love another man?” “Then we’ll love each other.” She looked at me with gleaming eyes and asked in a shaky voice, “Promise?” “Promise. You’re my person, Jasmine Ann Gersch. You don’t ever leave your person.”

“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.”