Being an editor, every so often someone submits something that really surprises me. And it isn’t until I get to the end that I realized I didn’t take a breath the whole way through, this short bit was one of those times:

I found myself feeling not quite like myself. It was a good feeling. It can get extremely boring living in the same body for almost thirty years, after all. I was walking down the street, my mind empty of thought, smiling at the prospect of a day off in a country that hadn’t exactly gone overboard on giving me days off and time to not feel like an outsider: Germany. Then I looked across the road into the park. A man was standing over a woman, although I didn’t know it was a woman the first moment I saw her. The figure was hunched over, trembling, and shapeless. Her black all-in-one form didn’t interest me as much as the man did. He was about to strike the shape, and the shape clearly didn’t like it, but there was not much it could do.

Do: I didn’t want to do anything. The community I lived in was largely Turkish, so doing anything other than a) applauding the man’s violent attitude or b) joining in and giving the woman a sound thrashing, would be greeted with little fanfare. Worse, I’d be next. I won’t make excuses. I did not want to be next.

But I couldn’t just walk on. That didn’t seem right either. So for a minute I stood there, pretending to admire the guy’s buzz-cut as though I was having one later that day. The guy hadn’t seen me, and I remember feeling happy about that at about the time he turned his head and I turned mine away. We hadn’t exactly met eyes, exactly, but there was something worse about the not doing so: the void in between. I got the feeling that not meeting his eyes was not the way to go. So I went to walk away, and that was when his hand came down, and I found myself staring as he went to hit the woman.

His hand stopped just short of her face. And that was it, over just like that. He walked away, watching me, and I walked on. I don’t know what I learned from the experience, but sometimes I feel like the woman still holds it against me. That she just wanted it to be over, and by intervening I had only postponed the inevitable.

You really can’t win.