Necroptic Vision

I was sitting at breakfast yesterday morning after about an hour of riding around Santa Fe soaking in the cool air, the kind of morning where the wind wakes you up better than coffee ever could.

As usual, I looked around the restaurant while I waited for my food. People watching. Half observing. Half daydreaming. And I swear I saw a guy who used to date my ex.

Now, I didn’t care about that part. That’s not the point. The point is: I thought he was bigger.

Back then, he seemed physically imposing. Broad. Solid. Larger than life in the way certain men do when they occupy too much space in your mind.

But yesterday? He looked… small. Frailer. Narrow shoulders. Slightly hunched posture. Just another aging guy sitting in a restaurant trying to make it through the day.

And I noticed the same thing Friday night when I went up to the Elks Lodge in Los Alamos. People I used to think were huge suddenly felt diminished somehow. Smaller.

And honestly, I’ve been noticing this a lot since the accident. People seem smaller now.

I don’t know why it started. Or when. Or where. Or what my Uncle Shifty used to call “the internets.” Because to him, the internet was “the three W’s.” Why. When. Where.

Honestly, I still laugh every time I think about that.

Maybe we really are shrinking as a society. Hell, this is an Ozempic nation now. Maybe people actually are physically smaller than they used to be. Maybe what I once interpreted as “presence” was just mass.

Possible.

Or maybe I occupy more space now. Maybe surviving all of this changed the way I move through the world. Maybe I stopped unconsciously shrinking myself around other people’s personalities.

Maybe.

Maybe nearly dying recalibrates your perception of importance.

Because alongside all these suddenly smaller people, I still occasionally run into giants. People who carry themselves with warmth and certainty. People who seem deeply grounded in who they are. People who don’t need performance or bravado to fill a room because their presence does it naturally.

And those people? They seem enormous to me now.

And maybe the strangest part of all this is that I see my father differently now too.

When I was a child, he felt enormous. He was loud. Heavy-footed. The kind of presence that changed the atmosphere of a house the moment he walked into it. My sister and I used to hear his car pull up and immediately tense up.

As a child, that feels like power.

But now? Now I see an aging man. Smaller than the figure I carried around in my memory for decades. Frailer. More human.

And maybe he always was.

Maybe fear magnifies people. Maybe childhood turns adults into giants because children have no frame of reference for weakness yet.

I still talk to him almost every day now. We have a relationship. But something fundamental changed somewhere along the line. He no longer scares me.

Maybe death changed my vision.

Maybe I developed some kind of necroptic vision. A strange post-death ability to see through the smoke people blow around themselves. To separate false size from actual substance.

Maybe I have the death eye now. The ability to peel back bravado and see fragile souls hiding underneath oversized egos. To see who’s pretending. Who’s posturing. Who’s desperately trying to matter.

Maybe.

Or maybe nearly dying just taught me how much space fear used to occupy inside me.

Because the people who are genuinely good? The people who carry warmth, confidence, and calm into a room? Those people still seem enormous.

And maybe that’s the real transformation. Not that the world got smaller, but that I finally stopped feeling small inside it.