20180115

thanks, i guess

So there's a story I haven't really told anyone. Not properly, anyway. Which isn't that remarkable--if you buy into the lie that a human life is really just a collection of stories, like I do, everyone has stories they don't tell. It's not like it's shameful or anything, I just hadn't figured out how to tell it.

This was back when I was still in Boston, back when I was younger and prettier, and the bones of it, well. I was walking to the T station from a friend's place and decided to try to catch the bus because I was tired and probably a little hungover. Smartphone bus-tracking apps didn't exist back then, so catching the bus was a bit of a gamble. It could cut a thirty minute walk down into ten to fifteen minutes of travel time if you time it right. If you time it wrong, that thirty minute walk starts looking pretty good.

Today it was one of the days where the timing was right--I saw the bus coming down the street, moved closer to the curb, and, naturally, it just drove right on by.

I ran after it for a bit and then stopped and shrugged and resigned myself to walking, having successfully wasted five minutes or so waiting for the bus. Then a cab pulled up, and the driver said, "Did that bus just blow past you?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Here, get in, I'll give you a ride."

"Sorry, I'm flat broke, man," I told him. Which was true.

"No, no, it's fine, get in."

And that was that. He drove me to the T station, I thanked him and apologized for being broke, and then I got out and went about my day. And I never told this story properly because it felt too clean. It became a quick throwaway anecdote because I was uncomfortable with telling a story with such an obvious moral as "sometimes people are nice." It's off-brand, you know?

I forgot that the whole time I was wondering if I'd really said I was broke, or if I just said something like "I don't have any cash," or something like that. That when I left I had this nagging fear that I'd somehow wronged this man, that I had cheated him out of payment, that I should have just said "it's fine, I'll walk." I didn't remember making the decision to get in the cab. I remember muttering the destination, still not quite sure what was going on. Was I about to find out how much money I really had?

And that's the real story, the real moral, the version that's on brand. The world we live in makes someone doing a nice deed for someone seem suspect at best. That in my mind, surely somewhere down the line there had been a miscommunication. And some part of my mind clearly knew that this was all nonsense, that what had happened was exactly what it looked like, so whenever I wanted to tell the story, it's the clean version. The version where I'm not a neurotic mess.

Or--and this is the part that gets me--maybe I'm imagining all that. Maybe I have such a hard time picturing something good happening to me, when I recalled the memory, I added in all those bits, all the uncertainty and anxiety and obsessing about the possibility of miscommunication.

Still, after all that, years removed from the event, my mind has finally allowed me to accept that surface interpretation. That sometimes, despite all of my bullshit, good things still happen.

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