Are you really there, and am I actually present here?

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It’s taken me years to almost adjust to the fact that when somebody seems to be in my presence, they often are not.

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I walk into a fast-food restaurant and it comes my turn to order from the menu. The fast-food woman smiles at me, wide-eyed and focused on me…but not really, since I realize that she is staring at a computer screen that is at eye level, she’s reading off her questions, and she hasn’t once seen my face—nor will she.

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The computer is me, to her.

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I enter the living room to greet and chat with a grandchild, but she only screams in protest when I innocently turn the TV off in order to visit with her. I thought I was doing us both a favor by reducing distractions so that we can actually visit with one another.

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She sees only the screen and wouldn’t know it if I were wearing a monkey on my head.

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I’m being interviewed on a TV show by an interviewer who never once looks at me, since she’s staring at herself in the monitor and adjusting her hair and angle the whole time.

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After recording a number of my stories for broadcast on a public radio station, I attempt to exchange pleasantries with the station manager, but I suddenly notice that he’s staring at his computer and clicking away the entire time he talks with me—he is responding to my comments with generic quips but doesn’t know what I am saying. I slink away and he doesn’t notice.

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The game-play kid looks at his lap as he visits with me, his thumb moving the images around, never once looking at my face.

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A texting teen stares enraptured at phone in hand and laughs at what she sees and what she transmits while almost listening to me but never knowing when the conversation has ceased.

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The hospital employee with pods in both ears looks at me but does not hear my question because the music he hears is the thing. I walk away uninformed.

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The hospital nurse talks as she enters and reads from the laptop before her, never seeing me but appropriately answering my questions.

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The man whose home I’m visiting watches his enormous television screen as we chat. He doesn’t see me at all.

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I am the interloper, the real flesh and bone person who is no longer needed in these people’s lives.

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In order to have them see me, I will have to become an entity submerged in their virtual world.

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I see their flesh, they see my electronic self.

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O brave new world.

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Uh, were you saying something

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© Jim Reed 2021 A.D.

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