The Fallen

One morning 8 years ago I stepped off a bus into the port authority
terminal and in the swarm of commuters a man fell to the floor and even
though he was larger and heavier than me when I bent down to help him
I lifted him up without a problem not because I am particularly strong but
because when my father had collapsed in the kitchen a few months earlier
a few weeks before he died the paramedics had showed my mom and me
the proper way to lift a fallen person you position yourself behind them
and slide your arms beneath their armpits locking your hands and pulling
straight up and that’s what I did stopping for a minute at most and then
hustling up the escalator towards whatever mattered that day who could
possibly remember what that was