Hauntings
I have become a ghost. For two nights now, I have haunted the railroad crossing where Daniel Schreiber lost his life. This scene haunts me, and I haunt it in turn, trying to understand how Dan’s life could have taken this strange, sad turn.
It’s hard to explain this obsession, the compulsion to haunt this place. This place is where Dan escapes me, where he eludes all understanding. I cannot understand what he would have been doing there. I cannot understand how he came to lose his life there. This completely nondescript railroad crossing is an abyss, where the chasm in my understanding stares me full in the face. And I want to hold it close. I want to hold onto the fact that I missed him, that somehow Dan completely escapes me – escapes me even as I try desperately to track down his final hours and minutes.
Walking the same tracks that Dan did just two nights earlier, I came to realize that, whatever led Dan to this place, whatever led to his death, it was a terrible fatality. “Fatality” in the primal, root sense of something fated. It was a terrible fate that brought Dan to this untimely end, and he suffered it just as much as we are now suffering his loss. Fate is not something to be reasoned with and reduced to our understanding; fate is to be endured and accepted.