I’m still on edge every time I hear a loud noise. I can’t unhear it. Explosions that I talked myself into believing were just construction noises or fireworks because it wasn’t even a possibility in my mind that they were anything else. The day I trekked across Boston twice, once light on my feet and joyful, the second racing to be anywhere other than here. Every time I stop for ice cream I think about how I wouldn’t have given up my prime finish line viewing spot if I had more self control, if I had been able to say no to JP Lick’s. I remember the reporters in DC swarming the plane as we disembarked trying to get a story, one that I didn’t want to tell. I spent the next two weeks at work watching videos about washing machine repair and flash mobs, mindless but necessary work to develop training data for video recognition algorithms, algorithms that could one day be used to prevent this from happening again. I eventually came to that trite conclusion that life is too short to do something you don’t truly want to do. And so I spent a long weekend in New Orleans and then a few months sorting things out before heading for the opposite coast. These last five years have flown by, but I still remind myself every day that life is too short to postpone ice cream.
