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Eating bagels in the morning meeting because they’re provided for free. Applauding when the plane lands because everyone else is doing it. Answering “fine” when asked how they’re doing because that’s the scripted answer.

This place, this Earthly place, is alive with the dead.

Almost two decades ago, I walked into a San Francisco financial district elevator filled with strangers. I broke the silence by looking around me and saying, “I just watched the most haunting documentary called The Bridge. It’s about all the suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge.”

This could’ve gone either way. The people who expected me to stand in silence until either they departed or I did could have mumbled something or delivered crickets. Instead, we all had a lively, fifteen-second conversation about San Francisco suicides. Instead of being dead ourselves, discussing death gave our little elevator ride some life.

I’m trying to do this more often, challenging the zombie shuffle. I am supposed to flirt with people more, an assignment my friend Julia gave me as a way to meet more eligible men to date. “You’ll mostly be chatting up elderly people and women, but it will put you in the practice of talking to people more.”

I don’t have trouble meeting people or thinking of things to say, but I know what she means. Like many people, I can fall back on polite silence even when I know everyone would prefer to laugh at the joke no one’s telling. Or I can think someone looks nice in a dress and refrain from saying so if it seems like they’re in a mood, when they’d most likely feel better after hearing a stranger liked their appearance.

A couple weeks ago, I was waiting to line up on my Southwest Airlines flight from San Francisco to Vegas. I placed my backpack on a table to pull out what I’d need for the flight. A man was standing close enough to the table that we were awkwardly near each other for strangers, but there was no other elevated space in the vicinity except this backpack-sized table spot, so there we were.

He moved away a half step to put space between us, not in a rude manner, but in the natural way most people would. He was wearing cologne, which isn’t always a winning move, but he smelled good. He was cute, too, and he was flying out solo from my hometown, so he might have been a single Bay Area man seeing his family for the holidays. The perfect opportunity to say something.

There was a way to tell him he smelled good without being the creepy person who had just encroached on his space. There were words that worked for that, even if his girlfriend or boyfriend turned the corner and joined him. But I waited a beat too long and overthought the moment, and I knew if I said it so late and so rehearsed, it would have come out like, “YOU SMELL AMAZING! TAKE ME HOME WITH YOU!”

So I didn’t do it. I acted like one of the dead, giving him a slight smile when he stepped away, silently acknowledging our crowded space without telling another human being—who probably would have liked the validation that a stranger thought he smelled good; he was wearing cologne after all—that he was appealing. That he was alive, and I was, too.

It’s the flirt Julia had advised me to work on, as a way of being alive in the world, so that when a man with dating possibility enters my airspace, I don’t small talk or silence him right back out of it.

I missed that chance, but over the past few months since accepting Julia’s assignment, I’ve been acting out my aliveness in other ways, to positive effect so far. I’ve recaptured that conversationally adventurous person who’d given strangers a spontaneous, unsolicited suicide movie review almost twenty years ago.

I’ve been complimenting the coat instead of just thinking how cool it looked. When everyone in the Barry’s locker room was holding their breath and squeezing by each other while “I’m sorrying” the hell out of each other, I said, “You’d think for what they charge us for a class, they’d be able to pay for a bigger locker room,” and the group laughed and lightened up.

I’ve come alive amidst the sleeping, whom I’d otherwise have mistaken for dead.