Boston

There was a time in Boston, or rather a moment. I was leaving a bar with a man who would never text me first, who didn't think about me when I wasn't around. Suddenly, a telephone pole fell onto the sidewalk. But there had been a person in that spot, and just like that, in a single, horrible instant, that person was face-down on the sidewalk, leaking fluids from their brain, fluids that quickly were forming a puddle that grew like a silence.

The fact that in less than a second, someone had been reduced to brain fluids, their face withheld from me - just a body, just someone with people screaming beside them. And I looked at this man, the man I was leaving the bar with, and he said, "Oh."

He said: "It's okay."

In that instant, in less than a second, Boston became to me just that: something less than a second, a quick blunt force trauma, a bloody mess. A perfect storm of horrible timing. A tragedy.

As we walked away - we had to, it was impolite to stare - I thought about how horrible this man was, the man who was leading me away from this horrible mess. I thought about how we had just been in that very spot, on the sidewalk, walking out of the bar. I thought about how timing is everything. I thought about how lucky it was that we hadn't been standing there at the exact second the telephone pole came down.

It had been a matter of seconds.

I thought about thinking, about how the brain eventually shuts itself down: in sleep, in dissociation, in death.

I thought today: that moment should have tied me to that horrible man, the one who didn't text me first, forever.

Or: it could have. But it didn't.

And that is a miracle. In tragedy: life keeps moving, blood keeps flowing, but inside us, where we keep thinking.