Manslaughter is not usually on your standard Tuesday night to-do list. Death is probably the last thing to cross your mind as you leave your night shift as a waiter and hop on your motorcycle to get home to your girlfriend. On Tuesday, January twenty-fifth, twenty eleven, I almost killed someone.
There had been no actual collision. I glimpsed his single headlight and slammed on the brakes. He swerved. I watched in my side-view mirror as flaming fiery sparks danced out of the asphalt and a living, breathing, human being slid, pinned underneath metal and steel, for twenty feet.
He immediately pulled himself out from under the bike and rose to his feet, his bike still humming up against the curb, headlight still on. His name is Jihad, but he goes by Kage. Despite a pained foot, Kage was not seriously injured. Despite being completely untouched in the car, I was psychologically broken.
If I hadn’t gone to the Laugh Factory that night, if the valet had come thirty seconds earlier, if I had decided to go to dinner afterward with my friends, or if I had taken a different route home, I would have driven home, unchanged and unregretful. But at 10:43 PM, I turned left onto La Cienega. If I had looked down at my phone, if I had changed the song on my iPod, if I had gone to grab chapstick from my purse, if I had a car full of loud, distracting friends, or if I had decided to have a beer that night, I might have killed that waiter who had just gotten off his shift and was on his way to see his girlfriend.
Life is not to be taken for granted. I have heard that cliché hundreds of times before, but I haven’t really heard it until now. The choices we make and the events that perspire are never futile or happenstance. Every step up to at 10:43 PM put me in a position to possibly kill Kage. Yet the decisions I subconsciously made at that exact moment saved me from doing so. Things in this world are more fragile than I sometimes realize. Kage is the reason why every choice I make matters, and why I choose to act on this responsibility and account for these decisions.
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