Tonight I had a very strange, frightening experience and it’s left me shaken and feeling so many different things. I met my parents at their apartment in manhattan for dinner- we left, walked to a restaurant around the corner and sat outside leisurely for just over an hour. At midnight when we returned to their apartment (I had to pick some stuff up, so I was going to go upstairs with them) we noticed a fire truck. Over the following minutes it became clear that a man had thrown himself/been pushed/fallen from the building next door to their building and was very clearly dead. Through the next nearly two hours, we became voyeurs. I am home now and so many thoughts are running through my head. I feel slightly disgusted by myself for having watched the proceedings for so long. It was very masochistic, too, because it’s not as though we got there after the police had taken the body away or even covered it. When we arrived they had just pulled up and we just putting crime tape around the area- the man’s body was uncovered and completely visible. His injuries were very visually brutal. We watched as cops came and went, detectives arrived in elegant suits that made them look like 1940s movie detectives (I assume since it’s a Saturday night they were probably out to dinner and were called in suddenly). We watched witnesses come forward and gesture towards windows and awkwardly write their phone numbers down. We watched a neighbor and likely friend of the dead man return home and I saw her face as she began to faint and then we heard her scream at the top of her lungs and collapse. I watched it mostly from my parents’ huge second floor windows, which looked almost directly down on the scene. Then we moved outside, behind the crime tape, for the final minutes before retreating home. I feel sick about it for so many reasons right now. The situation itself is the primary reason. I am very empathic and always have been especially in these extreme situations. But I know that even writing about this scene now is in some way (though I don’t mean it this way) an insult to this man’s death. I am nobody to him. I am removed and in a way have no right to use his tragic death as material for anything, even a blog entry…even an anecdote I relay to my boyfriend on the phone. But I’m human and how can I be peripherally involved and feel nothing or not feel a minute part of this event. But I do feel some strange guilt about even taking part. On the other hand, I’m a writer and even aside from that, naturally curious about things like this. But I am very upset now. My mom and I discussed, as we watched the goings on, the fact that had we come home 15 minutes earlier we may have seen him fall. I am glad we didn’t because I can only imagine how much worse I would feel right now. The part in the end that freaked me out the most was not the horrible injuries I witnessed or the weeping witness or the screaming friend, but the fact that while they awaited what I can only assume is the coroners assistant or some such person, and the detectives dispersed and finally only one lone cop was left guarding the crime scene- no flashing lights anymore- no activity at all- just the quiet midnight tribeca street that I know so well- the body of this person who had so lately been alive among us lay under a sheet between two cars, mangled, and all alone. Even the cop guarding him was 30 feet away. He was dead, it was undeniable, but his body was now just another piece of architecture in the landscape of the crime. He was not a person anymore- but in so many ways he still was a person. Watching that transition from person to nothing more than scrap was fascinating and horrifying and very very lonesome. It wasn’t instantaneous- ending with the last pulse. It was gradual over the course of hours. We finally dispersed not only because it was near 2am, but because there was, in a way, no longer a body- no longer anything to investigate. It was the piles of wrapping paper at the end of christmas, once all the presents are opened. It was the unappealing last bits of a large meal that litter your plate. Something that was so recently meaningful lost, then, any value or meaning it had, and was reduced to waste. Life is so funny. That may seem a harsh thing to say, but it’s all I can ever think in true moments of horror. Fate- and our paths are so unpredictable and therefor horrifying but also magical. Life is now. LIFE IS NOW.