Each morning, I leave my bed the way a kid leaves home for the first day of school, miserable, wanting to go back, possibly crying, and I find myself thinking about the night before and the day that lies ahead and mixing the two up into some kind of anxiety-ridden fog. That was certainly the case on the Wednesday morning I left for Hong Kong. There were so many things to be worried about. It was like a buffet of stress. There was my flight, which I was nervous I’d be late for. Then there was the idea that I’d be spending six days in Hong Kong and I hadn’t planned a thing. I had no place to stay, no sense of how much the currency was worth, and no real itinerary of things to do. And to add to all that, there was a certain girl whose apartment I had just left. She was still sleeping when I headed down to catch the first subway train. I thought about how much I liked her, and how I hoped that my side of the bed would still be empty when I got back.
All this is to say, on a day when I should have been excited, I was instead overcome with the enormous realization that nothing about my trip to Hong Kong felt right. I would be spending six days alone in another country, probably not talking to anyone and going to bed early to escape loneliness. Part of me wanted to go back to the girl’s apartment and curl up with her. I sat on a bench down by the subway tracks. Going back was a bad idea.
I was thinking about her when an older Korean man standing about twenty feet from where I was yelled something out. He sounded serious. I had no idea what he yelled, as it was in Korean and, despite living here for almost a year, I have no grasp of the language. I turned my head, though, as the noise demanded attention. In doing so, I could barely make out the image of a young man walking down the subway tracks. Not on the platform I don’t mean, but walking down the tracks themselves. I looked up at the board to see if the train was close. It was two stops away.
It was as though every person waiting for the train noticed the young man at the exact same moment, suddenly everyone began shouting and running. Everyone except me, that is. I continued to sit there, looking down at the guy on the tracks with mild interest. Things like this don’t happen, right? That’s what I asked myself. Yeah, there was a man on the tracks and the train was coming, but people don’t just get crushed on the subway tracks in front of you. It didn’t seem possible. I was sure someone would help him up and he’d walk away fine. For all the horrible daily events that happen in the world, for each car crash or electrocution or brutal animal attack or mugging, none of it seems to happen in my world. Secretly, I hoped the train would come and run the man over. Just to spice things up a bit.
But as I had assumed, nothing really happened. A subway officer was rushed to the tracks and he went down and helped the man back up onto the platform. The man didn’t put up any fight. He did exactly what the officer told him to. Back up on the platform, he staggered away. He was obviously drunk. The subway officer pulled himself up off the tracks and then led the man away. The shouting and running around ended, and in a few minutes everyone got on the train like nothing had happened.
Taking a seat on the train, I thought about a couple things. First, no matter how bad I might feel, there’s probably someone around who feels worse. I might be sitting by the tracks feeling depressed, but there’s someone who feels so bad he jumps down on them, and for that person maybe there’s someone who feels so bad he actually lets the train hit him. And secondly, I thought about how rare true disaster is. For all the anxiety, all of the possible catastrophes, nothing much happens really – the man always gets off the tracks before the train comes. Things have a tendency to be right, even when they feel all wrong.
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