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For the $100 contest... :)
One Split-Second, by Jenny Smith
It’s funny how a brush with death can cause you to evaluate your own life.
Last night a man died. A man I've never met, never seen, never thought about. And yet his death stopped me in my tracks. He was riding his bicycle on a busy road and a pick-up truck clipped him. He flew into the road and the truck ran over his body. He was killed instantly. We were near the intersection, and some of us saw him in his last seconds, some saw him hit the pavement and some saw the truck speed away. We found out later that the driver eventually turned himself in to the police. We spoke to the police for over an hour as eyewitnesses. The shock, fear and tragedy hit the all of us in waves. A man died here.
As we stood there, crying, praying, holding each other, I felt the ground fall away. The world stopped and sped up at the same time. There we were, a bunch of kids trying to comprehend what had just happened. Life. Death. The distinct line between the two blurred and as we sobbed I felt the life coursing through my own veins. How lucky to live, to breathe. And it can be taken away in an instant. The fragility of our existence is impossible. Can you imagine? As we gathered together, I could feel our collective innocence cracking. Life. Death. Life. Death.
As much as I try to deny that we will die, that I will die, that is exactly what is going to happen. In one split-second a human's existence was extinguished. In one split-second, a life was gone.
One split-second stopped one hundred and fifty people. The football game was forgotten; snubs from Jesuit became unimportant; uncomfortable bus seats went unnoticed. It doesn't matter.
This night, this tragedy, this brush with death has changed me. I hear my heart beating in my chest, I feel the blood pumping through my veins. I notice each inhalation and exhalation. I feel that my life, our lives, are running out. We have no way of knowing who will be on the bicycle next; who will be gone tomorrow. I feel this new urgency to find my bliss, to begin living. I have so many questions and so few answers. I'm scared. I want to do something with my life. Something great and good and important. I want to make a difference. I have to. It's time.
This past fall my school’s football team went to the state championship for the first time in school history. The game was a couple of hours away, so our school hired a couple of “rooter” buses to take fans to the game. We lost the game miserably to Jesuit, a powerhouse rival, and left the game bitterly disappointed and upset. We stopped at a McDonald’s about 15 minutes into the journey. The chaperones let us off of the buses to find something to eat.. The accident occurred just a block away from where our buses were parked. Some students were in the crosswalk when the pickup hit the man and many saw the body lying on the pavement for minutes before the paramedics came. Nobody understood what was going on. Everywhere there were kids crying, talking on the phone to parents and talking to each other. The student body president of our school, my close friend Michael, stood dumbfounded and horrorstruck, silent. He always has something to say, but not then. But what was there to say? Its life and its so short. We forget that too much.[/i]
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