Have you ever witnessed any person, a stranger, a friend, or a relative, passing out all of a sudden, because of disease or illness or accident? If you have experienced once, just once, you should have understood the feeling that your mind or consciousness might be, somehow, going almost blank, frozen yourself at what you saw. Perhaps, you would then begin to think and to give life a term.

     One evening, I was with my friend, Ben, having a dinner at a snack restaurant in Gonguian（公館）before we would be later headed for a club in NTU at seven o’clock. In the small restaurant, we saw two owners and one girl employee and some customers. We ordered sesame-sauce-pasted noodle and a bowl of rice with sliced meat. When my friend and I were eating and talking about events from TV news, Ben suddenly bursted out a cry, instantly followed by a crash of heavy and hard objects behind my ears. At my first thought, it might be the crash of thrown-down objects, like hard plates or metal substances, and I, at that moment, never conceived it a person fainting. Within seconds, I, as usual, turned my head back; however, I found that it was not the crash of heavy objects but of the girl, the employee. Stimulated by what was seen, I immediately stood up, intending to go forth to help her up, but I was, somehow, prevented. The girl, lying on the ground with her face upwards, turned up the whites of her eyes and remained unconscious for a long while. The two owners, squatting or kneeling by the girl, unceasingly called the girl’s name and gave her gentle pushes and pats while she was still. Standing rooted there and my eyes widely frozen, I was scared by the scene. To be honest, I was prevented from any move because my mind was going almost blank; but what was in my mind was that she didn’t struggle nor showed any bitterness, and though her eyes were widely open with the whites, could she see us all? Or, with ill-omened thought in my mind, would she faint and then die? Besides these thoughts, my mind was blank. Then, my friend, Ben, thought of calling the ambulance for emergent aid, and I turned clear in my brain. “Calling 110 or 119?” Ben asked. I said “should be 110, I forgot, just call it!” But fortunately, the girl came around before the ambulance arrived.

     Not knowing the reason why she suddenly fainted, we still couldn’t fix our mood after the accident. What impressed me and astonished me the most, besides the scene, was that we saw so vulnerable, so dear, so treasurable one’s life. Quoted from the first sentence of his song, “You are Beautiful,” James Blunt, a British singer gives the life a term, saying that “My life is brilliant.” “Brilliant,” on one hand, we know well that it refers to the life as being colorful, bright, splendid, sparkling, but on the other, it implies transience of life, which is vulnerable and short. Leaving the small restaurant, the sense of incongruity came upon me when I looked at people on the streets, hearing their conversation about going shopping for fashion, or gossip about the stars on the screens. I felt sympathetic about the situation of the girl employee, who had to earn herself a living but suffered sort of illness.

by Rubypier