My friend Kol wrote me this letter:

Cain Slice,

I’m sitting here, stoned out of my mind, 9pm, wanting to go to Whole Foods, but know I shouldn’t.

I keep seeing myself walking there, through the slushy sidewalks and frozen streets, telling myself, “No, I won’t die if I go.”

I want to go out and prove to myself it’s all in my head, and come home and comfort my silly fears with a big bag of popcorn, and peanuts, and heretofore unknown snacks, but in the end, I know I won’t go, and I don’t, because I’m sitting here with this deep knowledge that had I gone out into the snow that night, I would have died, and this would be the end.

I feel it as surely as a close brush with death: That time I was riding a bike and the chain broke and I flipped over the handlebars into the street, and a Honda Civic missed my face by an inch. Its front tire left skid marks on my hair. That time we met in Lima, and that taxi that wasn’t a taxi. That man in the bathroom, when I was young, and somehow I knew where to run.

My intuition scribbles death notes in my ear. Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go.

Oh, but I want to. I’m sitting here, one boot on, this heaviness in my bones as I see both paths laid out before me. My curiosity is at war with my intuition. My scientific mind is at war with the wisdom of my soul.

And yet, the cowardice. That I didn’t go get those peanuts and prove myself wrong. A coward, for not going out to die.

And now I have to live with that forever.

Sincerely,

Kol

P.S. I wrote “that night” even though it’s 11pm this very night, because it will always be that night. You don’t live through something like that without returning to it, here and there, and feeling how close you were to death.

What if I hadn’t listened?

Forever, you relive that moment as if the worst happened. As if you died, because maybe you did, and everything hereafter is the dream of what could have been.

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Introducing Kol: An old friend who will be contributing here anonymously.