“Hell is other people,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his 1944 play, No Exit. In the context of the play, the phrase doesn’t mean what is easily assumed—that would be the audience, or the reader, making it mean something that the author hadn’t intended.

Each catch-phrase offers a lens through which people or events can be seen or understood. One’s ‘sphere of awareness’ depends upon one’s physical senses, intellectual and emotional sensitivities, and a root ability to notice… anything.

What do you notice?

Do you see accurately through the lenses of your glasses, through your automatic perception process resulting from stimuli striking your physical senses? You see someone missing something that you feel is self-evident; you observe another person’s lack of response to a stimulus that you perceive. Is hell other people? Is hell your pain? Is hell all about you?

Hell is other people, you repeat, frowning.

 Daniel and Joe rode to and from school until the start of football practice. The first couple of days, they still rode in together, but not home because Joe had practice, and he hitched a ride home with teammates who had cars.

Pedaling the first morning to school alone again, Daniel felt relief. Joe was cool. But, Daniel treasured riding to school in the dark speed and back home in the daylight, stopping when he wanted, looking at things, and pondering. Whenever they passed each other in the halls, they said, “Hey.”

The fall arrived. It got too cold to ride a bike. Winter began. Daniel was back to reading a book on the bus ride on the way home until the snow melted, the mud dried up, and it got warm enough in the spring to ride his bike again. He didn’t check to see if Joe wanted to ride his unicycle in with him. He assumed not; Joe was older. Daniel got to ride in for a few weeks before school was over for the summer, and then he was done with ninth grade.

And then, visitors came to see him.

Toward the end of supper Mrs. Eisner shot him a look. “A young couple will be here tomorrow to see you.”

Daniel was mopping up gravy with a piece of homemade bread. His heart lurched. Brussel sprouts with butter and salt remained on his plate. Like bread and gravy, they were his favorites because everything at the Eisner’s table was his favorite thing to eat. “Um… do you know where they’re from?”

“In Flint, up north. They’re city folk.”