I woke up and my face was bruised and a front tooth broken half off and I couldn’t recall a thing. Then it came the way fear does that I’d just seen a man I knew get fired without ceremony or ostensible circumstance and all I’d done was walk along beside him down the anywhere corridor in some kind of semi-nosey, commiserative gesture of shoulder-patting reprieve though the shoulder-patting was completely figurative and the reprieve quite literally limited to two widened eyes and one furrowed brow of neighborly inquisition since I had no idea at all what a plain person in my shoes—or his—might do or how they’d lace them because mine had been criss-crossed and tangled since birth.

And I wondered without asking why he’d been canned with such abruptness while my lowly station I for the moment did appear to retain and I couldn’t shake the pesky sense of at least maybe somehow even more than partial responsibility, as if my existence within the situation we by nothing, I to myself insisted, more than chance shared meant—and by “meant” I mean “equated to”—complicity, apologetically aware as I nevertheless couldn’t help but be of looking down on him from sheer stature though surely many’d say it was in fact a more emblematic sort of looking down from some manner of privilege, relative, menacing, atrocious privilege poking through readymade apertures of irony, privilege which (they’d say) my privileged subconscious conveniently misunderstood as owing to certain innocuous superficialities of appurtenant physiognomy and meaningless coincidences rather than the harder, deeper-buried archetypal essences on which our fates are veritably determined, thinking it could’ve been me but it wasn’t me it was just he.

Originally published on Hijacked Amygdala.