Before the Fall

by Noah Hawley

Everyone has their path. The choices they’ve made. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery. You get on an elevator with a dozen strangers. You ride a bus, wait in line for the bathroom. It happens every day. To try to predict the places we’ll go and the people we’ll meet would be pointless.

Grief. Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured.

Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.

Someone had once said to him, It’s hard to be sad when you’re being useful. And he liked that idea. That service to others brought happiness.

Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?

Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you. And then it’s over.