Connection
By Luis Joaquin M. Katigbak

I hit the brakes in time. Looking back now, I'm not only relieved, but amazed. Maybe my reflexes have been honed by years of playing video games. (I doubt it, though: how many Nintendo scenarios involve the player using his feet?) Whatever the reason, the important thing is: I hit the brakes in time.

I was driving along Kamias Road, on my way to visit my girlfriend in San Juan, when it happened. Street children are so common in this city that one learns to just ignore them. What can you do? If one is sufficiently numbed to their existence (and, in time, we all are), they just become part of the landscape, like streetlamps or pitiful-looking potted plants along the sidewalk.

Well, this time, one of those human potted plants suddenly ran right in front of my Kia Pride as I was speeding along. It's not a very big car, but at the speed I was going, serious injury would have been a dead (if you'll excuse the term) certainty. But, as I said, I hit the brakes in time. I'm sorry, I just have to keep reminding myself of that.

I was so stunned I didn't even have the wits to shout the usual expletives. I just drove off, and was dimly, peripherally aware of the little sando-clad boy -- who had just narrowly avoided being smeared all over my bumper -- being greeted and high-fived by his companions on the other side of the road.

Was it a dare? Was he even aware how close his idiotic rite of passage had gotten him to death? Or perhaps it was something else, something less pointless but equally deliberate. I've heard that some street kids get themselves into accidents -- or even killed -- on purpose, just so they or their families can wangle a huge sum of money from the guilty motorist.

Pointless daredeviltry and tragic survival schemes. I drove on, more than a little shaken, but already wondering how I would relate the event to my love. It occured to me, then, that things could have gone another way, as well. Had I swerved instead, and plowed into one of the streetlamps or another car -- I imagined a shattered windshield, blood, my face split open.

And as I drove on, for some reason I remembered something I did when I was very young, something I did for what seems now to be no reason at all. This was before I even entered grade school. I was attending a little kindergarten school in our neighborhood -- I remember the outside walls of our small school were red brick, and veined with ivy; I remember it was near our local parish.

Our days were spent filling up our activity books and playing and napping and learning songs and things, and I remember never really liking any of it very much, as I would much rather have been at home watching cartoons. One recess period, I was sitting on a bench in the long narrow hallway that linked all the classrooms, and some of my fellow kindergarteners were running back and forth in some headlong game of improvised tag. Back and forth, back and forth, a bunch of children chasing each other with blur-worthy speed, yelling and hooting. As I said, the hallway was narrow, and as these kids ran past me I could have just reached out and brushed my hand against a speeding shoulder or leg. I was suddenly possessed by an insane impulse, and I closed my eyes, and thrust my right leg straight out in front of me.

The splat that followed was louder than I expected it to be. I had tripped one of the runners, and he had gone down, face first. Immediately I was surrounded by angry, disbelieving faces, mostly other kids my age, but with one or two adults among them. I remember being calm and unrepentant, though slightly worried that I would get into trouble. Anyway, for some reason, it all blew over and I was not punished. I was young and didn't know what I was doing, the adults must have figured. Besides, the boy I had tripped was a little surprised, but hardly (if at all) bruised, and he was soon running around again.

I recalled all this as I drove a little slower than usual through the city. And then I thought of a book I read just a year or two ago, a woman's memoir. She had written about a cancer that had eaten away the bones under her face, and how her whole life had been an ordeal -- going to surgeons and getting operated on, and worse, getting stared at and shunned because of her unusual appearance. Her face had started swelling up when she was a child, after a baseball accident: the swelling had not gone away, and she was eventually brought to the hospital and the cancer that would define most of the rest of her life had been diagnosed. What if, I thought, the baseball hitting her face had somehow activated the cancer? Some cancers, I've heard, grow from scar tissue. What if she had never been hit? Might she have lived a normal life?

And what if something similar had happened to that boy I had tripped? What if he had not been able to just brush himself off and go on playing as if nothing had happened? What if, in that moment of idiotic impulse, I had changed the rest of his life, saddled him with the burden of disfigurement or disability? What could I say to him now, aside from a pitiful and insufficient 'sorry'? I couldn't even give him an explanation.

I pulled my car into the narrow side-street that leads to my girlfriend's compound. I imagined her emerging from her front door, lovely as always, sporting a smile just for me. I knew that I would always want that smile, that I dreaded its fading from my days. Love makes it so easy for people to hurt each other, and lovers know that; we just have to try to be kind to each other, as much as possible, despite our fears.

But now, I fully appreciated for the first time that it's not just our lovers and loved ones who can alter the rest of our years, send us spinning in new, uncertain and unfortunate directions. It's drivers, policemen, street vendors, passersby, pedestrians, complete strangers, everyone. We all hold each other's lives in our hands. It is not a comforting thought.©