integrity

He looked out onto the street. The crossing was crowded, full of cars edging dangerously into each other. The air was a thick soup of noxious fumes, mixed with the urban cacophony of a thousand cars. He sat in the small tea shop, holding his little cup of steaming tea, and watching passively, as the cars barely managed to obey the rules of traffic. The tinny radio was blaring in the small, brightly lit, barely furnished tea room. The night was false outside; there was too much artificial light, a sea of pin pricks, marking the source of so many beams. He sipped his tea and thought of what would happen if he just sat there, and let the traffic take its own course. As the scalding brew washed down his throat, he already knew the answer. The cars would go wild, everyone would be selfish, everyone would want their own way. There would be chaos. He knew all of this, yet he let his mind wander on the different possibilities. Maybe, maybe just once, there might be a handful out there with integrity. Maybe there would be those who could stand against the crowd. With true souls. With the courage to see their own thing. And so every night, he came into this tea hut, pretending to leave the traffic to its own devices, just for a little while, hoping. But never had it happened. The same thing always happened. Chaos reigned. But he still came away every night.

And so tonight he watched, secretly, the tea going cold in his hands. The traffic waited, confused; like a blind dog who’s leash has been removed for the first time – an unrecognised freedom. Like every night. He still waited, waiting for the realisation to hit. Waiting for the first guys on the line to feel the raw unadulterated power that one feels when traffic laws no longer apply to them. And even from here, he could feel the tension build. But he did nothing. He just waited. And then everything happened too fast.

The tension reached a climax, and things suddenly went completely chaotic, like a sudden flash of lightning right in your face. But just before it happened, in a space of a thousandth of a heartbeat, a child ran across the road, a small little girl of no more than five. She had been waiting on the other side, aware of the tension, but oblivious to the magnitude, and so she ran, just a tiny instant before everything blew up. And from the small little tea hut on the side of the junction, he saw it all, but it rushed into his head like a number of sledgehammer hits, from a machine gun. Pinned him to his seat, and he watched chaos burst and then the small girl’s eyes wide open as she was simultaneously hit by three cars, tossed one way, and jarring into a car coming the other way, her body sickeningly stopped but her head kept going, and she was wrenched in half at her torso. He saw all this, and he was totally helpless. He was pinned in his seat, in the small little tea room, watching outside. He had seen a girl die. He had seen the wide eyes of the girl as she was wrenched in half. He had watched as chaos had burst. He had done nothing. And here he was, sitting in a small tea room, voyeuristically watching for someone with integrity, when he had none. The realisation hit him just then. He had let a girl die. He had killed someone. He could’ve saved her.

No, he thought bitterly, tears streaming softly down his cheeks and his heart suddenly going all black, I couldn’t have saved her. A man of integrity might have, I could not have.