A Discarded Tie in the Middle of the Intersection

It lay coiled up like a forgotten garter snake, sleeping or dead, its skin glossy and ribboned. The tie’s color was blue and green and it had that polyester sheen of certain dress clothes. The rain from earlier in the morning had beat down upon the road, and the pavement was glistening black, and the fact that it had been raining and was now dry made the light shimmer and dance across its surface. He imagined the scene of how the tie had got there. It was near the exit that all the ride-share commuters used, the established waypoint where they disgorged their charges built up in rest areas from all the way back to where the suburbs thinned out into farmland. It was at least ten feet from any crosswalk, which is why he saw it as he pedaled through the intersection on his way to work. He was lucky, he didn’t hate his job, but still it occurred to him often enough — as it had just then — how much else he could be doing with his brief time here on earth. He imagined that this was akin to what had flashed through the young boy’s mind as he tried to cross the road after the cars had dammed up the crosswalk in their effort to push forward at all costs in their restless advance, and still he was jabbed at and poked at by the unending wave of metal, honked at and prodded, and today — oh, no, not fucking today — it was not the day to push him. She had just broken up with him and he was not taking it well, and on top of that mom was sick and she wouldn’t go outside and now that dad was gone he had no help, no way to do anything but feel the impotence of a child incapable of caring for their parent, fifteen hundred miles too far away, and so…Fuck it, he’d said, stripping off the leash that heretofore had held him back, Today I am going to the bar. Or maybe he was older, bordering fifty, a man happily married, with two kids and a house paid off long before the rest of those friends of his who’d kept on renting long into their thirties; a man who’d always made the safe decision. He called his wife from the edge of the bay, and he told her what he’d done, and, at first, she didn’t know what to say. At first, she thought he’d lost his mind. But they’d be fine, she knew. She thought of how much she missed him, how much she truly could not live without him, and how long it had been since she’d really valued that. She thought of how it took a call, unscheduled, and her unprepared for, to jar her back to wakefulness; and once the shock of it had worn off, and she knew he wasn’t calling with the intention of ending it all, but, rather, to begin it all again she too was smiling. The tie lay there for him to pass over it as the young man spoke his first words to a stranger who would take him that evening to dinner, and the older man gave ten dollars to a homeless man he found as he strolled the Embarcadero. His bike wheel trod over the sodden cotton remnants as he thought to himself, Where did this come from, who wears ties in this town, anyway?