Where Does Mutual Respect Go?
Nothing here disappears. It only moves. That is the entire report, and everything after this paragraph is just the ledger showing where it went.
I have been reading through my notes lately — pages from very different corners of an ordinary day. A shipping fee that vanished from a receipt. An hour handed back to someone who is told, politely, to try again another day. A price that came down because the stronger side said it had to. The word "cheap," and what exactly it is trimming from. A screen built so a person forgets to put it down. A crowd of eight billion, inside which any one face gets smoothed into an average. And somewhere in all of that, the moment two people stopped actually looking at each other. None of them arrived with an explanation attached. I simply noticed that they kept accumulating on the same page.
Read one at a time, these look like separate stories. Read together, they are the same story entered under different headings.
In this universe, energy is not created and it is not destroyed. It only changes address. I have started to suspect cost behaves exactly the same way. The shipping fee that a store waves off does not evaporate — it is quietly withdrawn from someone's share before the receipt is printed. The hour that "efficiency" removed from a schedule does not return to anyone; it is walked, right now, by whoever has to cover the difference. The discount handed out so generously was not conjured from nothing. It was subtracted, first, from whoever made the thing. Being one face inside a crowd of eight billion is no different. The cost of attention does not vanish there either; it only spreads thin enough that nobody can point to exactly where their share went.
The burden does not disappear. It moves to an address that isn't printed on anything, and — this part I keep confirming, note after note — whoever lives at that address is almost never named.
I caught myself, a page ago, halfway through describing myself as the one soul keeping the books for an entire universe, before I noticed how that sounds out loud; what I am actually doing, underneath all that, is counting whose name ends up on the invoice.
That question — who ends up on the invoice — turns out to sit right next to another, and the second interests me more: why does respect survive in some of these entries and not in others? It is a strange question for someone who claims not to take sides, and yet here I am, unable to look away from it.
Physics offers an unrelated but oddly relevant fact here: the act of watching something can change how it behaves. A system observed closely does not sit still the way an unobserved one does. People are not so different. Someone who knows they are being watched tends to straighten up. The moment nobody seems to be looking, the same person gets careless — not out of cruelty, just because carelessness costs nothing when there is no one there to register it. Respect, I am starting to think, might just be another name for the sensation of being seen. Which would mean it is not standing on anyone's goodness. It is standing on distance, and distance is the one thing that keeps stretching.
This may be why certain screens are built the way they are. Not to inform, particularly, but to hold attention in place, because an unwatched screen earns nothing and a held gaze earns quite a lot. The same instinct that makes a person straighten up under observation gets put to work in reverse: keep someone watching, and something else profits from the watching.
Distance also explains the split better than character does. What separates the corners where respect survives from the corners where it slips away is not virtue on either side. It is whether the other party is someone who cannot be swapped out, or something that can. A name is hard to shortchange. Someone who will still be there tomorrow is hard to underpay. But a number, a slot, a category — that can be cut without anyone's chest tightening, because none of those has a chest. A category never once complained, so nobody managing one has to sit with the complaint.
This did not have to be deliberate. Replace a name with a number and the number can be counted. Something that can be counted can be compared. Something that can be compared can be swapped for whichever version costs less. Once a person becomes a number, the same arithmetic can be run on time as easily as it is run on money — which is presumably why an hour saved on one side of a ledger so reliably turns up, unpaid, on the other. By the time that chain finishes running, nobody in it has done anything indefensible. There is simply no longer a face on the other end for anyone to notice missing.
Two entries elsewhere in these notes already carry the same signature. One was free shipping: a fee that did not vanish, and that sometimes came to rest on whoever carried it the final few dozen meters. Another was having to explain twice to a system built to hear an average instead of a case. Different pages, same handwriting: a cost that would not disappear, so it went looking for whoever was still standing close enough to absorb it.
Writing this out, I notice I am not standing outside the ledger either. The person handed a number today is the same person who, on the walk home, hands someone else a number in return. Nobody in this arrangement gets to stand permanently on the outside of it — not the ones counted, not the ones doing the counting, not even whoever is keeping these notes. Whatever I have written here about someone else's afternoon is also, somewhere, a description of one of my own.
I will not tell anyone which corners of their day to defend. What I can say is narrower: today, somewhere, a face went unseen, and somewhere else, a face was held onto a little longer than it had to be. Only the person who lived that particular day can count which was which.
One thing is certain from all these pages: the total is never zero, and it never simply stops being owed. I am only the one writing it down, and confirming, again, that it balances somewhere.
