The Man Made of Smoke

It is interesting to note how an event that becomes formative for a patient might appear utterly inconsequential to an observer. We can never know the importance of our actions, however small and innocent they might seem. An interaction that, for us, is gone in a heartbeat might be something that another person finds impossible to forget.

Maybe that happens to all of us in time, I’d thought. We slow down a little. We loosen our knots. We learn to find pleasure in the smaller, softer moments.

When you’re young, there’s so much time left ahead of you. You can still achieve something. But then suddenly you realize that time is mostly behind you now, and there’s only the fact that you didn’t.

We can never know the importance of our actions, however small and innocent they might seem. An interaction that, for us, is gone in a heartbeat might be something that another person finds impossible to forget.

We are shaped by our pasts, not defined by them.

If you let your guard down once, the chances are that you’ll be okay. But if you do it a hundred times, the odds are going to catch up with you eventually

The idea that our lives are all separate journeys, and that we just intersect occasionally in places a step aside from them, before carrying on again in our different directions.

What if he had paid a little more attention and noticed that something was wrong? It was an almost ubiquitous reaction to trauma, and right now he was wearing the guilt as plainly as the wax jacket he was pulling around himself against the cold.