15

I think anger is like accidents in their varying degrees and various importances. If you are wearing shorts and you trip over an uneven curb, and the skin is grated from your knees like shaving of potato skins, then the accident is small and will heal shortly. It is a small anger, a small accident. A slight, an unkind word, a short, unimportant understanding.

If you break your ankle while you are skiing, and you can hear the snap of your bone and you immediately vomit because you just heard your bone snap in two, well that is another sort of accident. It is an accident that takes months to heal, and will always leave you a little bit weaker, and maybe you won’t get over it for a long time, even after your bones have healed, you still believe that they are broken and weak. It is the first degree of anger which leaves indelible marks in ink that blots you.

If you die, if somebody dies, then that is another sort of accident. And this sort is also indelible, but so indelible! Because it changes you, you are no longer who you were, but something different altogether. This sort of anger is unpredictable, just like accidents can never, never be predicted and happen in the most surprising of fashions – one day you are just in the hospital with some sort of terminal disease and you die, and everybody knew it was going to happen but they are surprised it happened anyways, and their reality still continues to be you, alive. But you are not alive, and when you are angry, you are not altogether alive but only holding on to the before of your accident, the how it was supposed to go, the wish that it had never happened, that this state of being would stop being.

When I saw you that day, well, I was the last kind of angry.