here's to life

we’ve haven’t spent a hell of a lot of time here, but we’ve learned enough about the real world to know that it is nothing like what we came to expect. there is no panning, no zooming, nothing gets framed or cropped, nothing is well-lighted. when you meet a girl’s gaze from across the room, no music plays, nothing slows down. when you raise your voice, the other person doesn’t wait for you to finish any more than you have any idea the next word that will come out of your mouth. when you pull the trigger, nothing explodes, no sparks fly, there’s just a dull, deafening crack, and the person you were aiming at is either dead or getting there pretty damn fast. and no, it probably wasn’t his last day before retirement, and no, he isn’t going to get to tell his wife he loves her with his last breath. he’s just dead.

in this place, this life we call home, not the one we wish we were in, with the good lighting and the clever script, but the one where we sit in traffic and go to meetings and die of everyday, boring diseases like heart disease, the moments that define our lives are gone before you realize they were happening, before you realize that that was the time you were supposed to say the line, to have the answer, to reach out and grab her and kiss her and never let her go. either you did it or you didn’t, and no amount of preparation could have made you ready for it, just as no amount of thinking about it afterward will change it. but oh, you’ll think about it, yes, because these moments are the critical corners in the road that makes up our lives: you’ll always remember the intersection, and you’ll dig in your head for years to find out why you chose to go left instead of right, and you’ll constantly wonder what your life would have been like if you would have gone the other way, but none of that will matter, because the truth of the matter is that you went left and you’ll never get to go back there again.

and there’s nothing quite like that feeling when one of those moments just passed, while you’re standing there over a guy who, while it probably wasn’t his last day before retirement, is not going to get to tell his wife he loves her since she wasn’t around when he had his last breath, with the afternoon sun sort of glaring through the high windows and reflecting harshly off the tile floor and into your squinting eyes, with your ears ringing softly and the gun heavy in your clammy hands, that feeling that you just turned left when you should have turned right, that feeling that the last two and a half seconds will replay in your mind until the day you die.