Three Day Road
Subject X - November 19/2006
I can only write when I’m depressed. This troubles me because I’m not. I suppose I’ll have to fake it. I play The Shins. They usually help to set the mood for fake depression. So does this late-night train ride actually. I pass countless lit bedroom windows and watch pickup trucks stop at red lights. I wonder if all those people really exist. Perhaps the Truman Show was onto something. So many lives that have absolutely no impact on our own; it can’t help but make you feel small. Somewhere out there there’s a boy having his first kiss. Somewhere out there there’s a young girl trying to reassemble her first broken heart. Somewhere out there there’s a woman living on a lifetime after losing her husband.
He was sleeping in the back of a big-rig. It hit another truck. They both exploded. There was nothing left to identify him but half a license plate. He was the father of 4 children. When the policeman told the women her husband had died, her youngest child laughed. His father used to pretend to be dead and then come back to life when the boy was close enough to tickle. He’s not coming back this time though. The boy continued to laugh. The woman broke. Everything had changed. Life was different now. How could that possibly happen in the span of a laugh? The woman fell to the ground. The cop’s shoes were shiny. Her son’s laughter was piercing. How would she ever stand up again? There are no books to teach you that. Actually, there probably are. But they’re just books. Fuck books. This is not literature; this is life.
The woman stayed on the floor. Hours passed. Days. Weeks. Months. Years. But one day she stood. Somehow, in some way, she found the will, found the strength to claw her way back onto her feet.
It is nearly twenty years later and that same strength is still there. It carries her through a life she would have scripted differently. It radiates from her children with astounding force.
I don’t know where to find the boy experiencing his first kiss. I don’t know where to find the girl with the broken heart. But I do know just where to find the woman with the strength. In fact, this train is hurling me in her direction. Tonight I will hug her for the very first time and a little while from now, when she walks her daughter – my fiancée, down the aisle I will call her mom.
There are so many lives that have absolutely no impact on our own. The world is full of them. But every once in a while, when fate decides it will be so, we find ones that do. And if those ones happen to be full of strength and determination, well, then you may find yourself having to turn to The Shins to feel a little fake depression. And suddenly, you don’t feel so small anymore.
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