Those moments of what-might-have-been, the ones I know of? So many come in. The shooting in the coffee shop I went to every day that summer in Tacoma, and waited for my order at exactly that window.
Running for the bus, the ice I sidestepped, as the guy behind me slipped and hit hard.
The night I was driving in lashing rain and at the last second yanked the wheel back onto the shoulder. I was shaken and pulled over, got out and looked down into the ditch where I wasn’t. The banks collapsing. The black water rising.
And the unknowns I share with everyone—all the ways you’ve proceeded unfelled, missed, passed over—you can conjure your own. Or not—which might make it easier to get through the day. I remember an article years ago in the Times—a woman walking in midtown Manhattan was killed by a falling icicle. It was snowing and windy and she never saw it coming. An onlooker across the street was interviewed, and said something like, “What the hell was she doing walking under an icicle anyway?” Very New York. You might be him. I have been. Believing, in some Roadrunnerish way, that I’m out in front of the day’s falling anvils and runaway trains. That every stick of dynamite tossed would surely fizzle before it reached me.
~
The car that veered and jumped the curb
where I nearly was but was not yet,
I stopped to watch a goldfinch
feeding on a thistle,
grown up through a sidewalk crack.
~
And this near miss. The nearest of all. Which I learned about just last week.
Right after my mother gave birth to me, her doctor discovered a cyst on her ovary. It was close to rupturing and she needed surgery right away. I knew that part. But then my father filled it in. Her doctor said if she’d seen it early on, she’d have recommended termination. (And she told her in this way, why? To amp the seriousness of the situation and how quicky they had to act? Because malpractice wasn’t on her mind and a doctor could admit a human thing?) The cyst was removed, my mother came home, and everything was, as they say, just fine.
But how do I say it? How even to think it? I am one who would not have been, or, Because diagnostics were less advanced, I happen to be.
“Happen to be”—what a weird phrase. By chance one is. Something. Not another. A particular. Just one of the ways things happen to fall.
How mild I felt about nearly not being.
I’m one of the ways things happen to fall.
From early on so many things called to my sight, breathed, spoke in some way of their past, or plans, with their fibers or breath; greenly, in tide pools they showed me their habits, some of their lives, the colors they turned, their shyness or fear, their undersides, hungers, scudding or bolting or decomposing—and I wanted to make something of my seeing. But if I didn’t, well, there they’d be, ongoing without me, and I’d feel a shivery, calm, bright certainty
The origin of this sensation is much clearer to me now.
I make these notes on the train from NYC back to Baltimore, the late gifts, the last colors, everything from the window I might never have seen: this buttery light falling on gutted rowhouses, on the bursting husks of cattail and milkweed. The way the rush of wind from the train bends the marsh grasses and startles a flock of red-winged blackbirds into the trees, windlifted and sown, like broadcast seeds.
The line “I’m one of the ways things happen to fall” references Wallace Stevens’s poem “Table Talk.”
Lia Purpura is the author of ten collections of essays, poems, and translations. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Looking (essays), her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as five Pushcart Prizes, among others. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, Emergence, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Header photo by Rusty Dodson, courtesy Shutterstock.
