Monday, December 5, 2011

New Zealand, Dec. 2011

For weeks before I came to New Zealand, I’d been saying, “If I die there, I’ll be cheated of a whole day! Gone! It’ll be as if the sun didn’t rise or set, the stars didn’t shine. And that’s not fair because I will have missed out on something big.”

Never mind that something big is always happening—consider the fidelity with which my heart beats, the tenacity of my diaphragm contracting and relaxing in synchronous breaths, the plasticity of my ever-changing brain, the ease with which my muscles type these thoughts. The demons of obesity haven’t come to claim their share of credit for a heart attack, a drunk driver hasn’t crashed my skull into the dashboard. Furthermore, only infrequently over the course of several decades has this happened to people dearest to my heart—my beloved family and friends.

We all know it only takes a fraction of a second to change a life time. One diagnosis, one mis-step, one electric irreversible emotional jolt. When a loved one says, “I have something to tell you,” we have all felt our hearts pound our ribs, our eyes mist, our muscles tense into near rigor mortis because we fear that moment has come. We all know that each day is a revelation of the unknown and that even the predictable is unpredictable. And yet I never think about it, until I come to New Zealand.

Sitting here at BWI on December 1st, I’ll arrive at my sister’s home on December 3rd, although it won’t be that long in real time. What is still weirder is that when I leave Auckland, I’ll be home in Baltimore that very day, despite having spent 24 arduous hours en route.

Coming to this little strip of land beyond which there is nothing but Antartica, has always been a refreshingly disorienting experience. Words I often utter—such as, if I could live again, if I could do it over, if I knew then what I now know—feel real and materialize into a poignant illusion of a second chance.


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