How to save a life.

Losing it fast I scream “help!” waving my arms leaning over that scary dark abyss that is in between me and the other side of the station where an express subway is flying past and the sound is deafening.

I want to reach up and cover my ears but I don’t because I’m waving my arms and screaming “stop!” even though I know that the man driving the oncoming subway can’t hear me. It’s like the way you yell at a fly ball as it’s cruising high over center field “go! go!” even though you know it’s not going to help it stay just above the outstretched mit below it.

Timing in life, I’ve come to find, is everything. Two minutes before everything was normal and I was heading home from work and thinking about how I hadn’t eaten anything since this morning and how work is exhausting and how its been too long since I’ve been on a proper date, all while reading my newest edition of the New Yorker like the good little New Yorker that I am. And just like any good New Yorker, I know that a train never comes when you want it to. You run and you miss it and you curse yourself for stopping in the bathroom on the way out of the office, for letting that woman push through the revolving door before you, for not running across Varick Street when you saw the light was just turning yellow.

Timing has led me to where I am now, watching the man at the end of the station sway back and forth. I think that he’s just had a few too many Pilsner’s after having had a bad day at the office, (haven’t we all). But when I see him fall onto the tracks I blink and then think that this isn’t my life and then blink again. Frozen in time nothing knocks me out of my stupor but the low rustling sound of the oncoming train.

The New Yorker now on the ground my arms are waving and, losing it fast, I scream “help!” Two other men have joined me now, all three of us leaning, waving, screaming, trying to save a life.

At the last minute the subway car screeches to a halt just like in the movies, two inches from its victim. I see it because it’s right in front of me, and wanting to look away I can’t because my brain isn’t working fast enough to catch up with my reflexes to let me.

Men in uniforms come running in from out of nowhere and push me aside, hopping down onto the tracks. In a daze I watch as they haul him out, his bottle of Maker’s Mark still in his hand. They prop him up against the wall and a pool of red forms behind it. As I stare, slowly reaching down to pick up my dropped New Yorker, I see the man drunkenly take a sip out of the bottle and utter one simple line to the medics who are desperately trying to help him:

“That was a close one, huh?”

As I leave the subway station, deciding to walk off the nerves that are still built up in my body, I start to think about how life’s just one big game of chance. How if you’re lucky you get out of the way in time, or are fortunate enough to have someone there save you. I guess sometimes we all need saving, even if we have a hard time admitting it.