A writing exercise from a previous class
If I were invisible, I would check out all the places that say “Forbidden,” “Do Not Enter,” or “Keep Out, and then I would go to the board rooms of the largest corporations to listen to their conversations, then the State Department, the Pentagon, and perhaps even the White House, out of curiosity. I would go to the payroll departments of these places to see what the salaries are like. I would also go anywhere else that I perceive to be forbidden to me because of gender, race, or lack of credentials, money, or status.
When I tired of these concerns, I would go to Hanama Bay in Hawaii, don my invisible diving gear and wade past the tourists who are snorkeling and feeding the fish by and go deeper and deeper, enjoying the silence and marveling at the schools of silver fish with blue and red lines and the reflection of the sunlight on their bodies. I know I would encounter brilliant colors and be dumbstruck by the infinite variety of sea and plant life. I would go deeper and deeper and try to adjust to the darkness.
As sure as I am sitting here, not invisible, I know that I would soon find on the ocean floor near the life that dwells at the bottom – tin cans, inner tube tires, fish knives, old shoes, beer bottles, and drums of toxic waste with deadly liquid leaking out from corroded containers. I would not waste my time pulling my hair in rage or crying out in pain at the evidence of human encroachment and stupidity, but I would hurry back up above the surface and join a world that needs me in a visible state, needs me to turn on a light or break a wall or open a door, to make a passage for someone else.
I know that I will at times discover that the walls were created by me and not by anyone else; at other times, I will be locked out by walls that others have placed in my path. I will say to myself, “I might as well be invisible – nobody sees me and nobody hears me,” but at the end of my life, I would like to be able to say, “At least I tried to make things better.”