Hit and Run


Dear Eugene,

Everything old is new again.

Life is one big paradox, isn't it?  Even the avant-garde among us are really re-traditioning things given, elements that are never truly value-free.

The road we took to end a year last night is the road we are taking to begin anew today.  I can walk on it and make little footprints or I can step on the gas and kill something.  Many things.  Unaware.

Hit-and-run, that's how life often feels like.

Now if I can see the victims, truly know the faces of those who are left on the roadside because of my living a decent, normal life, would it make a difference, any difference, to anyone, in me?

Every December when the whole world is having fun (at least that's how our self-portrait looks like) and we hear news about accidents on the road, we feel bad for the victims and secretly worse for the victimizers.  We might not be so broken to truly sympathize with the injured and deceased; we have certainly broken enough things in life to identify with the accidental killer, the incidental abuser, the I-once-could-see-but-now-I'm-blind.

One wrong turn, who's playing a trick on me that I should be the one to make and be defined by it?  The road was dark and so was the one I hit.  I ran away, as anyone would.  Don't sensationalize my pain and failing.

Here we are, 2019.  Same road.  Hitting and running all over again.  There's nothing new under the sun.

"What is truth?"  Pilate washes his hands.

Yours, Alex

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