an entry somewhere else

Please forgive the title of this entry. I can’t seem to reckon anything else. That may change by the time I post this.

(written first in my notebook—transcribed later)
There at the stoplight that many never stop for, I watched Fate unfold. So many ordinary things happened in the seconds previous. I sat waiting for the light to change and a woman crossed the road from the side opposite, as she’d undoubtedly done thousands of times in the city before. It was only a moment—a fraction of a second when the motorbike plowed into her as she straddled the white line dividing the lanes, the drive too late to notice, too fast to respond. I cringed myself, probably closed my eyes. When I opened them, there were three bodies in the road—the woman, sitting with head in hands, dazed, lucky to be alive; the passenger of the motorbike, without helmet but the most lucid of the three and able to be directed by the growing collection of spectators; the driver, with helmet, moderately unusual here, body limp as his friend picks his body up and out of the way so as to let traffic recommence. All this in maybe five seconds—the time in which I trembled at what I saw and did not see, my mettle evaporated. People ran toward them; I moved away with the flow of the cars. There was nothing I could do and this scene occurs every day here.

It is only later in the day that I write this, less shaken at a distance.