Invented by a Stranger

It’s a song that you’ve heard before, but the notes seem to be different. The rhythm is something that you can feel thrumming through your bones despite the relatively quiet volume at the moment, but you can’t remember ever having listened to anything just like this quite this loud before. The notes seem to fade away as you wonder if you had heard the song sometime in your childhood, on the radio during the car rides to school. It’s only later when you go to try to listen to it again because it was catchy that you realize it only came out a few days ago and there’s no way you could have listened to it before.

Sometimes you’ll come up with an idea for a story, or a drawing, or a fashion statement, and you’ll be so very proud of it. And then you’ll go to tell it to one of your friends, and they’ll smile and say “Oh wow, have you ever seen __? That sounds just like it!” You haven’t seen that movie, or read that book, or viewed that painting, but when you do a little bit of research you find that it seems just like what you just made in so many ways, but you swear you’ve never heard of it before.
Whenever you’re done with creating something, you have to wonder for a moment if it’s actually something that you created, or if it was first imagined in nearly the same way some unknown amount of time ago by a stranger.

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