Particles

Until the other day, I didn’t know you were real.
You sat like a statue on the corner of the street, the patches on your clothes trying to mend your broken heart. Extinguished dignity was burnt black and bitter on your fingertips; time had carved away at your teeth, a mould of your hard life.
You had no place to call your own; your roof was forever changing and your floor was constantly degrading.
You were a stranger, street dweller, homeless.
Until the other day, I didn’t care if you were real.
With the alcohol as my poison, polluting sense and diluting reason, I rounded the corner and ran into you. There was the sudden stop as metal pounded flesh and then the silence, where life hung suspended in the air. Time raked her fingers across my skin, waiting with baited breath to resume her pulsating rhythm. I lay there on the asphalt, waiting for everything to begin again, hearing your agonised moans slowly canter towards the gates above.
It’s funny how life works; like particles we float around, leaving traces of ourselves behind, although to this we remain oblivious. You were a part of the pavement. I never noticed you until we collided, when the explosion make me stop.
Why didn’t I hear you when your pleas caressed my ears? Why didn’t I see you when life was weighing you down? You were carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, but unlike Atlas, you couldn’t keep your feet. Why didn’t I understand? Why didn’t I act?
Because unless the particles attract each other, we’ll keep on colliding and repelling, regardless of how these affect everyone else. We’ll pretend that we don’t feel these collisions; we’ll deny that we are all particles, just because we don’t want to be the same. We act like great schisms divide us; class, race, politics and religion, but for these things to exist among us, we must have common traits, common ground to begin with.
As humans, as particles in the atmosphere, we think, we feel, we blink, and we breathe.
We are all the same but it’s the repercussions of these constant collisions that set us apart.
Until the other day, you were always there but never actually here.
But the night I crashed my car, I crashed into your life and never got the chance to apologize. We met, lived and then experienced loss in the space of minutes. I never got to know your name or hear your story.
Something must be done because only in death did I truly give you life.
And for that, for constantly repelling you because I never really saw you, I am sorry.
Like particles, we collided. And now I’m stuck on you.

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