I have been in one fight in my life, one real fight. I’ve been in martial arts since twelve or so; I’ve sparred quite a bit, but that’s just play, just practice—no matter how afraid you are to get punched, you know that you’re safe.
Once in my life I threw a real punch, defensively I’ll add, and that ended that. Tonight I came very close to trading blows with a stranger. I’m fairly sure the man was high, or insane, or some combination of both. I walked by him on the sidewalk after leaving a store. He started following me, moving with odd jerks like he was having seizures or as though something were wrong with his hips. He kept following me wherever I went, mumbling things I couldn’t quite hear. I thought it best to lose him.
I ducked back into the store, into an anteroom of sorts; a big glass affair with three entry-exit ways facing out and one facing inward, leading into the store proper. I went in one door and rushed out another, circling around behind some of the wall that wasn’t glass.
I kept circling, eventually coming back around to the door I had come in through. I’d had some hope that the man might have walked on. He was standing there in the anteroom, his head turning this way and that with quick, broad movements.
When he saw me, he began—he wasn’t shouting, exactly, just slightly raising his voice—”Why you looking at me?” he demanded.
The area was deserted, save for one soul ringing a bell beside a red bucket. I’m not quite sure why, I had some thought in my head of wanting support, I started edging my way toward the representative of the salvation army.
“Stop following me,” I said in as commanding a tone I could muster.
He repeated his question, and I my command. Silence. I started to walk away, keeping him in my sight. Pulling out my phone, I dialed 911. He wasn’t close; he threw a punch in the air angrily and stomped off into the store in that strange, jerking locomotion that reminds me, on reflection, of the bug in the Edgar-suit from Men in Black.
As I drove home, I felt awful. A wave of indignation would lead into a bathetic rage. I kept thinking I should have just thrashed him. Well, not in those words, not in words at all. Images kept running through my mind of all the ways I could have beaten him to a bloody pulp. It would have felt good, I know. It felt really good to throw that one real punch back in grade-school; it feels really good to win a sparring match; It would have felt really good to kill that man.
I pray that I never do, never kill a man in a rage, but there’s always that voice in my head reminding me how good it would feel to just let go.
Tale Told 