EPT___________________________________________________
They say that insanity is performing the same experiment again and again and expecting a different result.
It was a soft, golden shade of yellow sun that woke me up so early that morning. In my eyes the yellow light reflected fire—an unyielding force of flame, which, without the grace of God, consumes. Against this natural force of fecund flame, I brushed a tear from my weary eyes and sat up. In a long shadow across my bedroom floor, the light brushed a stack of rectangular stripes—light and darkness, light and darkness— against the hard-wood floor. I brusquely rose to close the worn and shabby window shade; with a twist and a creak, the layers of rectangular light vanished.
I left my apartment that morning about an hour later. I didn’t eat breakfast, nor did I intend to. Hands in my pockets, stiff against the bleak, biting wind, I walked two blocks, staring down at the cracks on the sidewalk as if I could soak the city in through this arbitrary observance of pavement. Each block of cement could have been a snowflake; as I passed each one, no two could be considered the same. Yet amidst the hundreds of millions of blocks of sidewalk slabs of stone roughly equivalent in size, not one could be metaphysically distinguished from the others—each was unique, but none important. And I as I continued to walk and take in the pavement blocks, I noticed that, to some extent, every single piece of sidewalk separated by a crack in cement was old. Each unique and subtle piece of pavement was worn with millions of footsteps over the course of its life; no longer was the sidewalk white as snow, nor was it bright and reflective—the years and busy people wore it down, treading hastily and without thought upon and through its hard and holy carapace.
It could still be pure—I don’t know—for all I know it still could be. There were no signs of an evil city slowly squeezing every ounce of sanctity from its flesh of stone. There was no blood or excrement staining its long and winding pathway, nor broken needles, nor vomit, nor cigarette butts. I saw none of these things, but I kept looking for them because I knew, somewhere in this city, that they were there. These blocks of pavement may not have shown it—they may have hidden beneath the piety and the trust of the people, but I kept looking for their sin. I knew it was there—and each block of pure pavement I walked across only reaffirmed the truth that had buried itself in my heart: it may not be dirty, but it is not clean.
Throughout the two blocks I walked from my apartment to my office, I never found what I was looking for. Outside my office sat a homeless man. He wore a tattered brown winter coat and a ski cap with a hole in it. He was huddled pityingly against a stone wall, and he smelled horrifically. Next to him was a cardboard sign covered in a sharpie-drawn message in atrocious handwriting. It read, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness sake.” He sat with an empty bucket he kept for alms. Though he was huddled against the wall, he was not still. From what I could tell, he sat, flipping a coin again and again, muttering to himself.
I walked slowly across the street, studying the man, almost approaching him with the air of an anthropologist. I was ten feet away, and I could hear clearly what he was saying now. He said, “Every time it’s come up tails, it’s come up tails, but I know it’s… I know it has to come up heads once. Just once—it will come up heads, it has to. Every coin has two sides, every coin has to come up heads at least once. At least once—if a coin has two sides, it has to come up the other side once. I just need this one heads.” I looked at him a few moments more. He never even looked at me—never gave me the slightest bit of attention—he only sat there, flipping a coin, and muttering.
When I left the office for the day, he still sat. Flipping again and again and muttering, waiting for his coin to finally come up heads.
