Return of Memoryfest - Day 16/31
16. Middle School (?)
We were driving back from Lens Crafters; I'd just gotten a new pair of glasses and was admiring the way the leaves on the trees looked so sharp and defined from the rear passenger seat. As we approached the T-shaped intersection between two residential streets on the way to our house, where the road we were on dead-ended and we needed to make a right turn, I shifted my gaze to the white picket fence along the perpendicular street and thought about how easy it would be to just keep going straight, drive right through the fence and across the lawn of the house there, maybe even into the house. I wondered what prevented someone from doing that, from just not turning the car.
That’s the first time I remember conceiving of the human instinct of self-preservation.
We were driving back from Lens Crafters; I'd just gotten a new pair of glasses and was admiring the way the leaves on the trees looked so sharp and defined from the rear passenger seat. As we approached the T-shaped intersection between two residential streets on the way to our house, where the road we were on dead-ended and we needed to make a right turn, I shifted my gaze to the white picket fence along the perpendicular street and thought about how easy it would be to just keep going straight, drive right through the fence and across the lawn of the house there, maybe even into the house. I wondered what prevented someone from doing that, from just not turning the car.
That’s the first time I remember conceiving of the human instinct of self-preservation.