How awful you almost were—to ignore a dying girl in the street!
That’s cold. What has happened to you in your life, to be so numb to the sufferings of others?
You give a guilty look to the first mate, pivot and jog off the boat, heading back into town. In mere moments you are back on the block where just minutes ago the girl’s slight form lay broken, ebbing away in the dust.
Her body is gone.
The thoroughfare is busy—horsemen, carriages, pedestrians. You duck and dash between the daily goings-on, bending toward the dust in search of evidence—blood, anything—when a passing woman grabs your arm, startling you.
She is older, hunched, a vermilion scarf wrapped around flowing gray hair, her ears ajangle with earrings. She wears a deep-sea-blue jacket over a white blouse, and a skirt that matches her scarf tumbles past her ankles. She gazes at you a moment with eyes deep and black. “Listen carefully, my flower, because what I’m about to tell you is very important,” she whispers. “It’s something very serious and very happy: your life is going to change completely! And even more: it will change the minute you step out of this room! You can be sure, my little flower, that even your boyfriend will come back and ask you to marry him, he takes it all back! And your boss will tell you that he’s thought about it and isn’t going to fire you!”
As she speaks, as you smile politely at her deranged soliloquy, a pricking begins within you, a small tipsy fizzing of alarum.
“And there’s more!” she continues. “You’re about to come into a lot of money brought in the night by a foreign man. Tell me at once!” she cries. “Do you? Do you know any foreigners?” She looks madly at you, her eyes desperate, her fingers digging painfully into your skin.
Will you tell the truth, as you always tell the truth?
Or are you understandably weirded out and just want to head back to the boat?
Or maybe, and this is what we most suspect, you don’t know what to do. Maybe you just got here. Maybe you’ve been wandering in circles. Maybe you’re a little tired of this strange ride called life. Giraffes? Girls on the beach? Jim Morrison? IT’S TOO MUCH!, you want to shout at the world.
Dude, chill out a minute. Don’t get all caught up in the hubbub. Certainly don’t think about what happened before now, don’t think too much at all, everyone knows that rule. Because what good comes of dwelling over past decisions? And who are you to be sure you’ve ever really had a hand in any of what happened? That you ever even had or now have the ability to make ‘decisions’? (Wait–you do think this? Do you also think this gives you power over me? Well wrong, there you go you just thinking again, which, yay, is the most boring game they is because it’s the one that you can only play alone in your head, congrats, ace, well-played, you win again, and again, and again, you’re always the winner).
Knock the thinking off and go here already.
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