Normally I watch the countdown, but this time I couldn’t get myself to pretend that devastation is someone else’s problem. Strange how one minute can feel like a lifetime, especially when you’re witness to one, condensed, spoken of in past and present tense, the future just a question marked by the beep of a vital sign monitor and the reluctant hope in a parent’s half-dead eyes.
“I’m going to be a different person now,” my brain told the rest of me, hormones swirling in just the right way for profundity to feel real. But like all good things, that feeling waned. I put it aside, but it’s managed to hover in my peripheral, waiting for an opinion, an answer, a result.
Commercials are funny like that.
A.K. Caggiano 