Regardless of the hour, this place is a terrible one for people watching. I am seated in a landscape devoid of movement and unpopulated by another being. I am locked in a vault of architecture that encloses me in its womb and clouds my vision with cold steel gray and white on walls. Here, there is nothing beyond sound to prove the passage of time. Above me the lights hang in the air and buzz like insects. The sounds of human existence abound, yet with sight, I cannot trace their source. From unseen pockets of the interior, I can hear footsteps and the crinkling noises of someone rustling through paper.

I came to sit here, my mind housing a secret that I did not intend on sharing and a power that I hoped I would not have to execute. If I fixate my eyes on a spot for long periods of time with enough determination, a person will appear there and I can watch them. They may stand briefly in that spot, seemingly unaffected by their environment, and then disappear suddenly. I have no recollection of them afterwards except for the blank expression their face held and the colors they painted within the space they occupied in that fleeting moment. Others appear when I stare them there and they can do nothing but walk around in circles. I witness their struggle to break free from their perpetually circular path but I can do nothing. If I break my stare, which is to say, if I lose my concentration, they will cease to exist in that space altogether and I will send them off to travel into a different dimension. It is the knowledge that I may only encounter these people for a finite time and then never again that keeps me captivated with them. Then there are those who appear right before me, perhaps while I am looking in the opposite direction or staring at some point in the distance. They are the ones who catch me off guard and startle me when I turn around as they are never in the place where I stare them to be. They walk hastily away from me with not so much as a glance back and quickly disappear. I never see their faces and get no chance to assemble in my mind who they are. These people create gaps in my research and cause me to experience lapses of memory. It is as if we are long lost friends who can't remember each other's names.

Even a sneeze that I emit echoes tremendously in this space filled with invisible people. The bodily blast passes through their vessels and reverberates maniacally between walls. It bounces back to me like a secret message whispered by one of the invisibles themselves. We are conversing in sneezes; when I sneeze, one of them sneezes back. It is how I know, when I am not staring, that they are there.

This food is never what I expect it to be and now I am eating it only because I am bored and mechanical. It is not that I exert that much energy in staring people somewhere. It is not that I linger on one person too long and grow weak with hunger. If anything, staring leaves my eyes feeling strained and eliminates my appetite completely. I wish that I could stare a person to take my food away or to walk towards me and take a bite of it. To make them disappear, I would close my eyes and open them to see the bite taken from my food. Everything would be real again. I experiment with trying to carry out this wish and interact with the invisibles. When I stare up this person and offer them my food, I watch as they carefully take a bite. Something goes terribly wrong. They swallow the food and begin to choke on it, even though I watch the food fall through them and land on the ground between their feet. I can't understand how, at the same time, I can see their feet as well as the ground they stand on. The piece of food should not be there either, and I realize when I take my gaze away and look upward at their stomach that it is more like a transparent shim than a solid mass of clothing and flesh. I am seeing the white on walls behind them. As I tip my cup to my lips and take a drink, my mouth fills with a sour taste and the transparency of person disappears altogether. My memory of the person begins to fade and I glance down at my food which sits uneaten since my last bite. I may have been staring at the white on the wall, frozen and paralyzed this entire time. I think I was stared here by someone as well.

Richel Martinez is a graphic designer and plays guitar in Bronwyn.