There's something poetic about the distance strangers put between each other. Not too far and not too close, but just the right amount. You can see this on the first day of school. Nobody who doesn't know nobody wants to sit next to nobody, so they set themselves down to the appreciable acceptable minimum distance of social separation: one seat apart. As if the extra 2 feet can make all the difference in the world, as if it was enough space to shield you from all the incongruities, the odors, the mere presence of somebody you don't care to know, and sends their existence careening off the edge of your consciousness.
Even when we're not in lecture halls or labs, or any other setting, we like to segregate ourselves apart, and what distance is it? One seat away. Two seats would be just too much, nobody wants to sit by themselves by such a margin--no, it has to be closer. But right next to you? That's uncomfortably close, close enough for me pick up your none-too-flattering body scent, the remnants of the last meal on your breath, the emnations of your body heat, and close enough to make me feel the general queasiness brought about when two people who don't know each other are shoved into close proximity. Classes tend not to be the most sociable of spaces, so it becomes nothing more than an endurance trial, hoping that their presence doesn't gnaw at your nerves long enough to distract you from learning.
Most of us, if the situation permits, would like to separate ourselves into our own clusters, cliques, and circles, from everybody else. The empty seat being the barrier between different groups. In movie theaters, cafes, restaurants, and public places in general, you just don't want to mix up with the "others."
Humans have this oddly detached relationship with each other. Most of us require some form of a relationship with another human being to survive, to function, to keep us from going insane. Yet, we also require a level of privacy, and keep others from getting too close to our core. We all have people at varying distances to our core, and we hope to one day find the one person that we can completely expose our cores to. But to make sure that we don't indiscriminately expose our cores to someone looking to deal massive damage, we need to maintain that peculiar distance of one seat apart.
Not everybody prefers one seat however. Some people, like me, would love to have the whole auditorium to myself and some people wouldn't mind if the other stranger sat in their damn lap. My contention is that if you average out the seat preferences of everybody in the world, the average will equal one seat. So the next time you sit down in class, in a restaurant, in a movie theater, just think about that empty seat next to you and ask yourself, would you mind if somebody sat there?
