A Winter Story

I used to fall down a lot. Like, literally. Every damned winter. Didn't matter the shoes I wore, or the effort I put into being graceful. Gravity and mother nature wanted to bust my ass. I remember this one particular winter there was a guy who was shoveling the sidewalks on the apartment complex I lived in. I didn't know him very well, and definitely didn't know his name. Just some guy, seemed nice enough. Quiet. Kept to himself, at least as far as I was concerned. 

That morning, I was awoken by him scraping his damned shovel against the sidewalk, as if he could WILL the last remnants of ice from the slabs of concrete that served as a walkway between buildings. I just remember being grumpy about it. It was YEARS ago, and I've slept since then. I got ready for work, as displeased with life as I always was, and walked towards my car. 

At this time, I probably didn't have proper shoes for the winter snow, and I used to wear plastic bags over my shoes as I walked from my apartment to my car. I'd get in my fancy Ford Focus [Fernando was his name, if you feel compelled to know], drive to work, walk up the isle to the bland building that served as the USPS data encoding center. Once there, I'd take the plastic bags off my feet, put them into my purse, and walk in. As nonchalant as I could muster. The joys of poverty.

The only reason I bring up the shoes and the plastic bags is because I really can't remember what was so treacherous this day as I tried to climb down the small "hill" that separated the grass and the parking stalls for my building. I did, however, find myself briefly unconscious … having slipped and fell, hitting my head pretty hard on the ground. 

I came around to the scratching and screeching sounds of that man scraping the sidewalks. I fell and he didn't stop shoveling. I vaguely remember screaming as I fell, and I don't know how long I was unconscious, but no one came to help me. And for a moment I cursed him. I cursed him with as many colourful words as I had in my arsenal.

A few years later, he shot and killed himself. 

This is the only memory I have of him … him inconveniencing me with waking me up, and then not checking to see if I was okay when I fell and hit my head.

My point in sharing this story is merely that I go in and out of thoughts of suicide. It's my normal. And I wonder what he was thinking when he was scraping that sidewalk. Was he unhappy then? Was he so absorbed in his own misery that he didn't notice he'd gone over the same part of the sidewalk 800 times, and didn't hear my cries as I bit it? Was the biting of the cold wind on his nose the only real feeling he had that day?

Here was this dude who may very well have been clinging to the last threads he had holding him to this world, and I was butthurt about some arbitrary things. 

But that's life … and death I guess.