The Avoidable / The Avoided

On a dewy September morning, during an ordinary walk to work, I was struck suddenly by a man trying to win a race against a red light. The stroke was swift, a blurry charcoal streak that left behind the smell of burning rubber. My soul was swept up with it.

The first of my heavenly thoughts came to me through the voice of Kurt Vonnegut: so it goes. The next of which, from my own consciousness: you idiot.

Without form, I noticed that my emotions had nowhere left to go. Before, when I was angry, I was still Me. When I was sad, it was I who had a frog in my throat. Now, it seemed, what I felt was what I thought was what I was. And I was Pissed.

I began to berate myself. Mom always said to look both ways before you cross the street. You have the lyrics to “In the Middle, in the Middle, in the Middle” by They Might Be Giants memorized from Dad’s CDs, a song about looking both ways. You were listening to “Moon Child” by the F16s too loud, and fantasizing about your future, your career, the romantic life ahead, and forgot to look both ways and lost your ability to look anywhere at all! I couldn’t contain my frustration with the situation; but then again, I couldn’t feel the bodily sensations of frustration anymore. I had no brow to furrow, no lips to purse, no shoulders to hunch, no lungs to inhale deeply and let out a felicitous “FUCK!” with. And yet, I could understand that I was somewhere else, that I had been taken from people who loved me. Another thought, then, another becoming:

This was all just so… completely… avoidable.

What happened next was a fission of philosophy, a proliferation of revelations. A sequence of circumstances strung together in perfect accord, culminating in the single moment of my cessation. An absolution of any accountability for my aimless, awkward ambling.

I was running late to the office that morning. Unusually, unreasonably late. All because I’d been up half the night celebrating my friend’s recent engagement. That rascal. Had he not spent the last several years nurturing a loving relationship, had he proposed a day earlier, had he not forgiven the bride’s prior foray into adultery, had he not asked us all to stay an extra hour to share in his joy, I wouldn’t have snoozed my alarm on September 20th. I would have left the house at 8:05 on the dot, as one does, and the driver might have hit another daydreaming commuter in my place.

It was then I resented the groom; no, not him, but the bride. No, her parents! Had they not both been on the same plane to the United States, had they not bumped into each other at baggage claim because they carried the same colored suitcase, I would still be alive and well. I would be breathing in the crisp autumn air, listening to the crunch of newly forgotten leaves under my Blundstones. They were to blame for my untimely exit.

Although, it was the bride who took me shopping when I was in need of new shoes. I would go through a pair every few months, which meant my means of maintaining modishness were materially meager. She and I had traveled to an outlet mall, all those years ago, and when I tried on my soon-to-be favorite pair of boots she told me I looked like I “just came back from a farm-to-table wedding in Vermont.” There was a particular strain of mischief in that remark, one I knew my friend would appreciate, and it was not long before I put the two of them in a room together. Without her, the leaves beneath my steps would crumble to another tune, perhaps a softer song. I was getting away from myself. It was her family lineage I resented all the same!

And the driver, the man behind the wheel. The instrument of my inevitable and irreversible inactivity. The line between him and me had already dissolved, so much so that I could see the threads that bound him to this tragedy. I waded further into a gumbo of moksha and empathy. A forgetful father, fated to fumble his first-born’s new schedule. Someone’s son in a hurry to get home to her, desperate to carry his child once more, though she had long since outgrown his arms. By then, carrying her meant car rides to school, and she was still waiting for hers. A civilian, ceremoniously stepping on the accelerator as amber turned to blood.

I could not weep for him. I could only imagine his regret. The weight he would carry for the rest of his life. I wished then that I could tell him about baggage claim, that everything was set in motion decades before either of us was first considered. That the freedom he felt to choose his actions wasn’t his to begin with. Nor was mine. Nor anyone’s. So it goes, I thought again, differently this time.

I turned my attention inward, less concerned with the faceless driver and more concerned with my facelessness. If only I hadn’t been so distracted. If only I could learn from this and bring those lessons back to earth, then this might have meant something.

Meaning. A word I once thought autological, now an ouroboros: if I mattered, then my death must mean something; if my death means something, then surely I mattered. Never mind that I was now immaterial. I decided to slip into something more comfortable, and wrapped myself in self-loathing. What had I done to deserve this? Did hell await me on the other side of this clarity? Was this hell instead? Condemned to contemplate the caverns and crevices of my consciousness ad infinitum? To approach my death from all angles, revealing that everyone had a part to play and nobody was going to tell me I was the lead? Every pitiful thing I had done, and every wonderful opportunity I pursued, every kiss I shared and kiss avoided, all betrayed me in order to give purpose unto themselves.

I lay now at the center of a causal web, spun by generations of weavers who would never know what they had made. For the first time, I felt no anger toward them. Another becoming, slower than the others, swept me along a current of calm. I sank peacefully into its conclusion: perhaps the world was free.

From where I was, in the still waters, every decision ever made seemed to bend toward the singularity of my release. The groom was not to propose on any other night. The bride’s parents were not to purchase another color suitcase. I was not to leave home one minute earlier, and the driver was not to remember his daughter’s schedule. We had all been held prisoner by the gravity of an event none of us could foresee. And now, at last, this too had come to pass.

My physical form became acquainted with the sidewalk, and whatever invisible force had spent eons arranging us around that intersection had no further use for us. The obligation was fulfilled. The world could move again. I fancied myself Jesus Christ, though He, at least, saw His end coming. I had died not for the sins of others but because of them, and unlike my sins, my demise was unoriginal. Pedestrian, even.

Nobody laughed. The water grew deeper still, encircling me in velvet vastness, a voiceless vacuum devoid of verdict. Oblivion was obvious and ostensibly overdue; every variable had resolved itself and every vector pointed inward.

And down I went.

…

On a dewy September morning, during an ordinary walk to work, I was very nearly struck by a man trying to win a race against a red light. The stroke was swift, a blurry charcoal streak that left behind the smell of burning rubber. I’ve always had two left feet, and I tripped over the curb as I attempted to march into the crosswalk. A stutter in my stride had just saved my life.

For a moment, neither of us moved. Through the windshield I caught his eyes, wide with the same realization as mine. It was quite intimate, the knowledge that we had nearly become very important to one another. His face was rugged and tired, and so was mine. I heard my mom’s voice telling me to be careful when crossing the street.

Jesus Christ, I almost died, I thought. I filled my lungs with a healthy heap of harvest air to let out a felicitous “FUCK!”

I raised a hand in understanding, and he returned the gesture.

Then I looked both ways and went to work.