Entirety

I don't tend to see things the way most people do. I don't mean to say this as a way of pointing out that I'm a special snowflake. It's simply a matter of observation. I sincerely don't see things the same way as others do. I think perhaps it has to do with the way I think and the amount of data I absorb.

Every word spoken to me. Every detail of everything around me. Every fact is absorbed, catalogued, and sorted in some bizarre alchemical process within the confines of my skull. It's as exhausting a process as it sounds. If I don't make time alone, time where I just sit and think, I start to get sick. But this isn't about that. It's about the way I see things, and perhaps a little bit about the way I think.

I think in entireties. I don't break things into components. Everything I learn is taken into consideration. Nothing is discarded. Everything is connected to everything is. There is no such thing as extraneous information to me. It may not be immediately relevant but information is always important.

When I look at something, anything really, all that it is crosses my mind. I look at a person, any person, and I see vibrations beyond number forming particles forming atoms forming chemicals forming proteins forming cells forming tissue forming organs forming a creature with roots tracing back through millions of years of history to a wad of amino acids in the time before there was time. And from there it stretches back to the death of a thousand thousand stars whose blood and bone dance in the subtle dance of the cosmos.

And when I look at that person at that moment I can see the echoes of who they are, what choices they have made. I can smell the touch of all those they've loved and hated, every bit of pain, or significant pleasure. And more than that I can see the hundredfold paths that stretch before them.

It's not seeing the future. In the same way that looking at a seed and imagining the tree it will become is not seeing the future. It's more about extrapolating. It's an act of studied imagination not divination. Though sometimes I can look into the eyes of a person I have known and see who they can become. I can see the hundred different potentials that they carry within them. The different people that they can become. Sometimes I can even watch as their choices strip away some of those potentials. Things beyond their control. Different points of data that they didn't assume were important.

But all data is important.

I know this, I understand it in my bones. I understand it to the point that it looks and feels like madness. Everything interconnects. We are all unique manifestations of particles and circumstances. We are snowflakes both by our nature and our place in space and time. But we are all connected to each other. In more ways then our minds will ever be able to fully comprehend.

Not that it's ever stopped me from trying.