Everyone makes choices all the time. Anything and everything constitutes a choice – you can make a choice to not make a choice, to be active about making a choice, or to be lackadaisical about your choice and just hope for the best. In the end, though, isn’t that what we all have to do? Hope for the best? That that maths test hasn’t turned out as badly as we thought; that that spot on our arm is just a freckle; that our memory really isn’t going.

That’s all we do. Choose, and hope we’ve chosen the right option.

But really, who knows what the right choice ever is. The lines between right and wrong are so often classified and categorised as plain black and white, but there’s always grey scale. Is it right to stab a man who’s stabbed fourteen people himself? Is it wrong to grab that last piece of chocolate cake even though your sister was reaching for it, because she ate the last chip? Perhaps a mundane example, yes, but deciphering between right and wrong is always a concession, always a compromise… usually only distinguishable by circumstances. There’s always a grey scale, there’s always a bargain to be made. Whether the bargain brings you what you want or not is usually the distinguishing point between what’s ‘right’ and what’s ‘wrong’. But, then again, people who are driven by a desire to fulfil their own needs rarely have insight into the ‘bigger picture’.

Sometimes I think I have insight into the bigger picture.

Sometimes I think the bigger picture would be better off without my insight.

---

There’s the hustle and bustle of the busy city around me, a car honking angrily to my left and a street vendor yelling to my right. Amid this chaotic din, I stand, completely lost, letting my quiet desperation sink in.

“Excu – Excuse me?” I try, gently tapping a passing pedestrian on his shoulder, the grey synthetic material of his jacket crinkling slightly. He doesn’t stop, doesn’t acknowledge my presence at all, just keeps walking and shrugs the crinkle out of the material covering his right shoulder. “Pardon me… pardon... pardon me, ma’am?” A woman with a friendly looking face looks up at me, eyebrows raised, and hesitates a moment before smiling broadly.

“Can I help you?” She talks with a bright English accent. It sounds so out of place in this bustling city, where cries of ‘taxi!’ in harsh and nasal American voices drown out any other splash of culture.

“I’m sorry, I’m trying to get to…” I trail off, searching through the leather bag hanging at my side for the name of the bloody place. “Thomas Jefferson Park?” I ask triumphantly, when I finally get the little yellow post it in my hand.

“Tourist, huh?”

I wince, “Is it really that obvious?”  The woman nods, still smiling.

“Painfully. Sorry,” she adds when she notices my downtrodden expression, but I shake it off and ask her again.

“Thomas Jefferson Park?”

“Oh, yeah, you’re really close. You’re on 116th now, so just take a right onto First Avenue and keep going down a little bit,” she makes a walking motion with her right index and middle fingers, “until you get there.”

I smile and nod gratefully, “First Avenue. Right. Thanks,” and turn to leave.

“Hey, what’s your name?”

I turn in confusion, and sure enough, she’s facing me with a questioning but kind look on her face. I hesitate for a moment before pulling a glove off my right hand and extending it.

“Lara. Eckles,” Her hand has comforting warmth to it as she grasps mine.

“Nice to meet you, Lara Eckles,” she tells me, and her eye twinkles a little. “Gloria Paxton.”

“Likewise,” I reply, and there’s a moments hesitation before I drop my hand and nod in her direction again, before beginning to swivel on the spot. “Thanks again, Gloria.”

---

We never really know what will come of the choices we make, whether the outcomes will work in our favour or not. But the interesting thing about most choices we make is that the effect of them tends to be both good and bad. The outcome of my choice to ask Gloria Paxton got me where I needed to go. For sure.

The outcome of my other choices from the beginning of that day to the point where I was on 116th street got me to that point where I had to make a choice. Those choices did not have individual respective consequences of their own, they all led to my making this one choice.

So, yes, I got where I needed to go.

But it didn’t get me there the way I wanted to.

---

“Listen, Gloria, don’t you dare move or I swear to God I’ll – I’ll – I SWEAR TO GOD I’LL CALL THE POLICE! NO, DON’T MOVE, FOR FUCK’S SAKE, GLORIA!”  

I could feel my pulse throbbing throughout my entire body, hear it in my ears, almost taste the excitement and fear and anger in my blood. I could feel every inch of my being, alive, completely in tune with my body. I could feel every small movement of my eyes as they struggled to keep up with the intruder’s actions, I could feel my hands shaking in fear as she reached behind her, and I could still feel, so indescribably clearly, my blood rushing through my body and every small movement I made up until there was a searing pain through my chest, a scream of anger from where Gloria was standing, and I felt completely in tune with myself right up until I just didn’t feel at all anymore.

---

Just for the record, the world fades to greyscale as you die.

---

Choices, like the world is for me now, are never black and white. Always greyscale. I made a choice that got me to Thomas Jefferson Park, but that same choice got me to a cold slab in a morgue.

I chose to depend on the ‘kindness’ of strangers.

I guess there’s good and bad to everything.