Could being a caught in 9/11, finding my best friend dead and my relationship collapsing have all been avoided if I had stolen one shutter?
It was a Sunday, in August, 2001. I never really thought about the shutter after that day.
A month later the towers fell, eight months after that Ben died, ten months after my relationship came crashing down.
I know it’s an idiot notion that something as ridiculous, something as unimportant as my committing property theft has some sort of profound effect on how the world works. What it did make me realize though, is that day, that afternoon of contemplating taking Einstein’s shutter, signified the last thing I could remember being both upsetting and unimportant. It had made me think that life was somehow unfair, but in a subtle and somehow frivolous way. The next few years showed me what true humility and pain really was.
The shutter was most likely tossed aside without so much as a thought of whose house it once adorned. Einstein’s shutter would eventually make its way to a landfill, slowly disintegrating to become part of the earth again. Perhaps that was best for everyone.
Perhaps...