the following was found on a toronto subway car

To Whoever Finds This,

By the time you get through this first sentence you may find yourself compelled to throw this piece of paper back onto the ground and continue on with your own life. Nevertheless, something told you to pick up this dirty piece of paper in the first place. Because of this, I ask you to read on.

It's a beautiful world, they tell me. It's funny, though, because no one really believes it when they say it. We idolize the great truths: love, knowledge, and self-actualization. The problem is that we're too scared to face them when we are confronted with them. We don't want to be alone but when we encounter a stranger we feel the need to quicken our pace. Someone does something nice for us and all we can be is suspicious of their motives. There' poison in the Halloween candy. There's rape drug in your champagne tonight. There's a terrorist in your economics class. There's a gun in his pocket. He'll aim at you.

I am so fucking tired of being scared and ineffective. We can't blame ourselves, though. The question we really need to ask is how any intelligent Creator could have let us fall so far? Every animal has some sort of defense mechanism to help protect them (speed, strength, poison). So where is ours? Oh Right! We have intelligence; intelligence that fails us when we require it. What can I do here but curl up into the fetal position and surrender to terror: scream, cry, call for mother, stay in my room, wear a tinfoil helmet to protect my thoughts from aliens and brace for impact? The most fucked up thing about this is that we are truly scared of is being afraid: the nausea, the shiver up our spines, the breathlessness. Have you ever noticed that in every terror movie some stupid idiot of a woman falls when she's running away from the axe murderer? Well, stop making fun of her because that could be you. Then we have the audacity to name people heroes who don't revert into infancy in the face of danger.

I may be cynical. I may be a self-hating human being but, for the life of me, I can't be satisfied with this hypocrisy. We are scared to be loved, but also scared to commit. We hate dark alleys, but we like scary movies. We tell our kids everyone makes mistakes - nobody's perfect. Then we go out to the surgeon and get some Botox pumped into the creases in our foreheads because we're scared of not being perfect. We teach them to be giving and they come back to us wondering why the old lady swatted at them when they tried to help her cross the street. Try telling me that you aren't scared of the man sitting across from you on the train right now. Thank God there are all these other people around, right? But tell me that you wouldn't be scared to be alone with any ONE of those other people. I dare you to make eye contact with them. I dare you to say hello and observe the looks on their faces. I promise you that you'll find yourself looking at someone who is startled. Even afraid. Ask them how their day went but don't expect them to give you more than one word in return. Let's not lie. You would be scared too if you saw yourself staring at you from across the aisle or standing down a dark alley. Welcome to the human race, baby! Have you ever felt so welcomed?