is ringing in my head.
This morning I rode into sunshine. The air conditioning in the bus was refreshingly cool, the sun was warming up the day outside. I messaged a friend whom I hadn’t had time to catch up with these past couple of months, he chirps back a cheery reply over sms- and I tell him,
I’m doing well too… Good to be alive! :)
I get off my bus. I have vague plans to help a friend today, and the intended errand takes me away from my usual route to work. I drop two bus-stops before my usual stop. I brisked walked once off the bus, each step I took was filled with purpose, it honestly was. Only the red lights at the pedestrian crossing had reason to slow me down in my tracks.
And then that sound. Like a clap of thunder. The two men standing beside me recoil and walk off in the direction we came from. They re-circled their steps- they still want to head the direction I was headed for – but something ahead was hindering their path. My eyes search ahead.
I thought it was a traffic cone. For some reason, the bright orange colour registered. Something on the gravelled road. No, the orange something was someone. Then I realised it was a man. It was a man who was flattened by a huge industrial truck that had tried to beat the lights. The man was lying not 1 metre away from the bulbous tyres.
His misshapened head kept my cold attention. I feel hot, and yet I feel cold. It was all black hair, and fresh dark red life dotted the gravel – the splatter makes a straight line, marking the crushing impact of lost life. I wanted to walk away, and yet the incident was far too bizaare for me to just shrug it off and turn away. Someone just died before me.
The bicycle he rode became him. Only one wheel portruded from his distressed form on the road- one wheel, not spinning, flush against him, pressing into him, and he’s pressed upon the road.
I don’t consider it a coincidence that I celebrated life literally moments ago, before witnessing a life put out in front of me in such a gruesome manner. I’m not sure yet though, what this is supposed to make me do, but it is a call for some kind of action.
I think he was a foreign man. He must have a family somewhere else, folks still not made aware of the freak accident that claimed him. The road, someone’s actions, his own haste and his abandoned mind when he biked across that crossing took his life.
And there is a reason why I was there and then.
If you are reading this now, I’d say good on you. I’m immensely glad we’re alive.
Filed under: moronics
