I am writing to say sorry. Like a childish king gifted with an empire he knows nothing about, blindly sending orders from his comfortable palace, I hurt you through my ignorance.
Over the years, I have learned that you are indeed more like a living empire—an agglomerate of wetlands connected by a network of rivers and canals of all sizes swirling around a rocky center and surrounded by a flat, dry desert. Your billions of civilians are defended by armies of soldiers waging chemical wars. Intelligence agents sample the battlefield, memorizing the smells of invaders to react faster in case they come back.
If I were the size of one of these soldiers, you would be taller than Mount Everest. Lying down, you would cover the area of a city. When I walk around the streets, I sometimes imagine seeing you like that in the distance. I marvel at your 3,000-meter-high feet, your legs covered in bent dark trunks, and the round peak of your knees, as I would marvel at a mountain range in Switzerland.
But the metaphors only go so far. Our relationship is much tighter, weirder also, than that of a king and their empire. I can simply think, “Hmm, I’d like to drink,” and you adjust the tension of hundreds of muscles and tendons to form a dynamic equilibrium, balancing the weight of the water. You establish a communication line between my lips and my biceps to apply just the right amount of pressure for the water to slide down my throat. And when I dance rock, I don’t only dance with my partner; I also dance with you.
You are in my head. In my dreams, I walk around and you are here; everywhere I look there is only you. You arrange the furniture in rooms before I open their doors. You are the puppeteer behind the characters, playing both strangers and familiar faces. You whisper in their ears the weirdest lines. You also take care of all the physics simulations (with approximate accuracy, I must say). Sometimes I realize it’s you I am interacting with, so you take a break and allow me to fly around at will.
During the day, you are quieter. You stay in the background. You observe all the stimuli we receive and curate them to bring to my awareness only the ones you think are worth our attention. Like in my dream, you create this augmented, or maybe virtual, reality. Everywhere I look, things make sense. You stick labels on all the objects in my field of vision so I can name them effortlessly. When we talk, you blaze through the pages of a giant dictionary to turn the sounds from our ears into meaning, and then in reverse, to turn the flow of meaning I create in my head into movements of our tongue and lips.
I want to say sorry because I think I hurt you in many trivial ways. I applied unnecessary pressure on my skin after the shower, pushing the towel in hopes that it would absorb the water faster. I forgot to drink water in the morning. I scratched a wound you worked so hard to repair. I often exercised too little, even though I know you work a bit like a dog and need to go out and run almost every day to keep your natural cycles in order.
I also feel bad for ignoring you for most of the day. I know it’s your mission, like a waiter in a high-end restaurant, a sound engineer during a concert, or the orchestra playing the background music of a movie: if I don’t notice you, it means you’ve done your job right. But there is something that feels wrong about that. I am scared of how much I could hurt you if I don’t even notice you.
And I there is so much I ignore about you. I’d like to know you more, in all your weirdness. I even say “you” not knowing how many of you are there, or if it even makes sense to say “you” when I should say “I.”
In the grand scheme of things, these are insignificant little things. After all, we are forming a healthy team. But I only have one of you, and I’d like to take care of you like you take care of me.
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