I.On Saturday in the early evening, I was walking to the bar
to...
I.
On Saturday in the early evening, I was walking to the bar
to meet a friend. The cold was an opponent, and my brain was filled with bees.
A couple walked in front of me, arm in arm, this in the heart of Harvard Square.
Striding down the sidewalk towards this couple and me came a big Boston bro,
tall and broad, with a massive Dunkin Donuts jug in his hand. He started being
mouthy to the couple as he approached.
“Lookit you guys. What a cute couple.” He passed them by,
they ignored him, but he kept talking at them, and looked over his shoulder
back at them as he did. “You guys look so cute to–”
And he veered, not looking ahead, and slammed into me. He
sent me spinning backwards, and my shoulderblade banged into the cold metal of
a street sign. My hat fell off.
“What the fuck?” I said. I wasn’t looking at him, I was
picking up my hat and putting it back on my head and readjusting my bag which
had slipped down my arm with the force of the collision. I figured he’d just
kept walking. He hadn’t. He’d stopped. And I looked up and saw him standing
there on the sidewalk. And when I looked at him he shouted at me.
“Don’t look at me like that you stupid cunt.”
I kept walking. And I noticed something. The cold air had
been making my eyes water. But the tears that pooled then as I moved towards the
bar a block away were so much hotter than the ones provoked by cold, as though
they came from a different place inside me, deeper and more molten.
II.
This morning, I fell. I was taking a short early morning
walk. It was so warm yesterday, a thick melty warmth, and I didn’t think of
ice. I was bombing along, coming down a hill, rounding a corner, a slick of
black ice and I went down, hard and fast. No time to flail or try to catch
myself. Upright one moment, smashed on the ground the next. A car slowed beside
me as I righted myself. A man asked if I was okay. “Yes,” I said, feeling the
blood rise to my face, not from injury but from blush – how embarassing, how
humbling it is to fall – “I’m fine. Thank you. I just slipped on some ice,” I
said, which I’m sure was obvious to him. “You sure?” he asked, leaning across
the front seat of his car. “Yes, thank you.” He drove on. I continued my walk,
feeling a sting at my knee and a throb at my elbow. And I asked my own self, am
I okay? Am I sure?
III.
I feel a little more at the mercy of gravity these days. An
op-ed in the New York Times the other day discussed why all of
us should care about the two black holes slamming into each other. The writer
observed that it’s not the type of discovery that improves our toasters, but
one that opens up our understanding of the universe, that gets at the biggest
questions: how did we get here, where did we come from? Questions which,
it occurs to me now, serve as prequels to where
will we go? He says the discovery, like art, like literature, has the
capacity to “dazzle and bewilder.” It’s a combination of states I find myself
most often in. The stars swing above us in their silent sweep. Our moon swells and shrinks. Down here, we
bash into one another, fall and rise, swing away and, by forces mysterious and
powerful, unnameable, are tugged back into orbit.
