Brush With Death

Today I left the house under my first Beijing blue sky, and returned under an equally blue sky, in sweltering heat, feeling sad and happy at the same time.
Happy because I found a skateboard for about US$25. Even happier that no one looks twice at me when I'm riding it, even in the subway terminals, which are long, often slightly downhill, smooth as silk and have lots of fun human obstacles.
Sad because of so many of the people I saw today. There are lots of beggars in San Francisco. Most of them are drunk. There are lots of beggars in Beijing. Most of them are missing essential body parts. A lot of them are younger than me.
I got off the subway at Tiananmen Square today, excited to find out what it would feel like to set foot inside history itself. I never did. The square was crawling with so many tourists, all with matching red hats and orange popsicles, that I couldn’t bring myself to go in. If I want sweat and involuntary human contact, I'll just get on the subway.

Which I did, eventually. On my way back I passed a crowd of people gathered around a young girl lying on the ground with her head in her father's lap. Her mother sat at her feet, shoulders hunched, face hidden, with a sign I couldn’t read and a donation pot in front of her.
The girl's hair had almost all fallen out, her feet were swollen, her skin was greenish, her eyes were rolled back in her head and she was covered in sweat. I couldn't even guess what she had, probably because it’s something we don't get in the United States.
I bent down by the mother and she glanced up at me, just for a half second, crying profusely and silently. My stomach lurched at the familiarity of the look in her eyes. I realized I had seen the exact same desperate look on my own mother's face when she wasn't sure if her own daughter was ever going to be ok again.
It caught me by surprise, so much so I could hardly move. Like when you smell something from childhood and a wave of memory surges through you.
All of a sudden I was lying in a hospital bed again, with stitches running all across my face and tubes sticking into my heart, my lungs, my veins, and my family huddled around me, praying- with my mother looking at me with those exact same eyes.
Except this time, I was standing strong, looking down on myself, hanging on by a thread exactly the same- except this time, I was lying in a street instead of in a world class ICU ward, and this time my parents were staring at grey bricks instead of green monitors. The only thing the same was my mother's eyes.
They were exactly the same.
Mortals. Capable of nothing more than praying our own delicate fleshy shells will withstand the harsh world around us. Remember not one of us is special. It could happen to you.
On the crowded subway home a young man gave a tired old man his seat. The old man half heartedly refused but of course the young man was already helping him sit down. The smiles these strangers exchanged were beautiful.