Pondering fate's cruel game of Russian roulette

Worries were groundless today, but what if one day your biggest fear came true?

By TD Mischke

Published on March 23, 2009 at 4:35pm

Three o'clock in the morning and she's not home yet. No phone call, no explanation. I try her cell. Nothing. I call the party she was supposed to have attended. She never arrived. I look for her phone book so I can start calling her friends. It's not there. I think of calling the cops, but I can already hear the sergeant saying they can't do anything until it's been 24 hours.

There's a tightness growing in my chest. My breathing is changing. There's a tone in the air—a sound—like the vibration of a bass string. It brings the feeling of walls moving in.

I'm a worrier, have been for years. I make things worse that way but can't help it. I try to think positive thoughts. I tell myself nights like this happen all the time, to husbands everywhere, and there's always a reasonable explanation waiting at the other end. But of course there isn't always, is there? Sometimes there's horror.

Time slows. It's a night of living in a lonely capsule of stress and foreboding.

Is this where it all changes? Will this be the date that forever separates two starkly different halves of a lifetime? I feel the beginning of the descent. I notice everything about it. If what's coming is coming, I am about to shed a skin and emerge as someone unrecognizable to myself. Not better, not worse, just wholly foreign.

But she walks in the door. A distress call from a dear friend altered her evening. She didn't know her cell phone was turned off. The capsule bursts, the pieces fall, scatter, fade. I feel a little foolish. There are those out there who know better than to borrow trouble, those who would have kept cool until the answers came. I envy you.

When I hear people say they're hoping some tragedy is just a nightmare from which they'll awaken, I think of it like this, the way I awoke. But sometimes no shift occurs. Which means that awful feeling bursts not into the pleasant realm of mundane sanity but into an even greater nightmare of searing reality where the ground slips out from under you and the sky falls and life's borders implode.

I escaped that, again, tonight. It's like being led to the cliff, feeling the rocks slip beneath your feet, then being pulled back to a waiting car and driven away, allowed another day of simple pleasures. For those of you who are sent over that cliff, what is there to say to you? I don't know your fall. I read about it in the paper every week, shudder at what you must be going through, and drift on to the sports pages. I can empathize only with the walk to the cliff, the feeling of getting ready for the worst, the sense of impending doom. That is its own pain, but it's hardly the fall.

The fall is what we all hope to escape in this world. Out of the gate and to the finish line without the fall. It's doable. But there's a sense of that roulette wheel continually spinning, turns being doled out. Mine spun again tonight, and I won on red, and I'll perhaps win again some warm night this summer. But the difference between red and black is a chasm wider than the cosmos. Across town, someone loses tonight. And this remains, after eons, the philosopher's conundrum: Why?