The Twitch

I sat on the train on the way home yesterday and my left eye just started twitching. Well, not the eye, but the eyelid; muscles surrounding it. I can't recall the last time it happened, but it happens. I hear it's a sign of tiredness and/or dehydration and/or overconsumption of caffeine or similar substances.

Anyway, sitting in a four-seat 'cubicle' didn't feel like the most ideal place for such a thing to occur, and suddenly I was very self-conscious of how I´d appear to everyone around me. I tilted my head towards the window, yet in the dark of night, in a well-lit train, that window is like on big mirror. And you can't try to look out the window either because it'll look like you're looking at the person sitting on the seat across from you, since the view at the point you naturally angle your gaze to look out at is exactly where their reflection is. If they look out the window at such a moment, it'll seem to them as if you're looking at their reflection in their reflection of you. And then, are they looking at you or just looking out the window?

So, I took out my newest travel book and started reading. Swedish Mafia. Interesting gang-related trivia. I'm on the chapter of Hells Angels right now; Los Bandidos is up next. Apparently there's a whole world of gang-related violence and warfare out there that us normal people don't know about; unsolved crimes and murders are no rarities. I really dove into the book, yet the twitch kept going. I tried relaxing. I thought about closing my eye, but with closed eyes I wouldn't be able to angle my head downwards in order to view the book (well of course I could, but that'd just be weird), and at a straight-forward angle it'd just be all the more perceptible. People would think I had a tick.

I glanced around to see who else was twitching. I pondered life and the cosmos and wondered if aliens exist somewhere out there and if they've learned how to combat symptoms like this if they do. Maybe they can just instantly relax any part of their body at will.

I pondered our body's potential to be immortal, considering how our cells are constantly renewed, and there is really just one gene in our body that causes this process to slow down and us to age. So technically, if we could manipulate that gene we could live forever. Though, I wonder how much our brain would cope with the additional storage requirements. Maybe we'd need more brain matter. If we went through operations which enlarged our skulls, thus creating room for our brains to expand, maybe our brains would fill the void and allow us to garner even larger mental capacity! And then the twitch stopped.