I don't remember well when it was that I saw two homeless men fighting on the platform at 8th avenue station of the L train in New York City. One man was holding a chain in his hand using it as a weapon and I think the other man was unarmed. 8th avenue is the terminal station of the L train. One man tried to shove the other off the track and the moment when they ended up falling over together, we heard the noise of the metro reaching. Two men both acknowledged the train's arrival and yet continued to fight. The crowd at the station observing or ignoring the fight of two men stood up looking at the train and shout "STOOOOOOOP!!!!"
I was there just being a kind of an onlooker. The flash brightly lighted up the men down the track and the train was braked hard in front of them. Since it was the terminal station, the train was reaching in slowly so that no one was harmed. The men climbed up the track and it was the end of their fight. Maybe the whole thing had taken even shorter than 10 seconds from two men's fall to the stop of the train but it felt so long for me that as if I was watching it in slow motion.
Today I was biking on a road near my house and saw a small crowd of baby porks crossing the road. And some seconds later, a car ran over the crowd without decelerating though having the porks in front in their gaze, and killed two of them. I heard the sound of the car squishing their bodies and their intestines were out. I stopped pedaling my bike and stood there in silence. It was my first time seeing this close someone being killed by a car. It was strong.
I left the dead porks on the road and continued on biking. 1hour later when I came back on the same road, the carcass was no longer there. Someone might have taken them to eat at home. The road has already been returned to be usual and I couldn't tell where exactly it was that they were killed. I felt like it didn't have happened. But I know it has. I know it just because I've seen it. If I haven't seen it, I guess, it would be that the incident didn't exist for me.
Now I'm thinking that many things in the world are the same way. Without really seeing it or being part if it, the rest of the world, except where I am, might not exist for me. And without caring about it, even if I see it, it will soon become a thing that didn't really exist in my reality. As I no longer think a lot about the incident of March 11th in Eastern Asia and as I ignore the fact that the civil war still continues in Middle East, I can just simply stop thinking about whatever and live in what I call "peace." Is that it?
